Call for Submissions
BECOMING
December 2026 / January 2027
Vol 11, Issue No. 6
Guest Editor: Gillian Lichota, Founder of the iRise Above Foundation
Submission Deadline: October 25, 2026
Before breast cancer, identity was something most of us built without much thought. We became who we were through accumulation: choices and relationships and time, layered slowly, without a finish line.
Then the diagnosis arrived. Suddenly you are faced with figuring out who you are inside a life you didn't choose, on a timeline you can't control, in a body that has been asked to do things you never agreed to. The version of yourself you thought you knew became a question instead of an answer.
This is what we at Wildfire Journal call becoming.
Not a before and after. Not a story of who you were and who you've triumphantly become. It’s something more honest and more complicated than that. Think: the ongoing, unfinished, sometimes unwilling process of being remade.
Becoming holds two truths at once: who this diagnosis made you (the parts of yourself that cracked open or fell away or surprised you with their stubbornness) and who you are actively making yourself into next. Both matter and both belong here because for many of us living, there's no clean line between them.
We want your stories about identity in motion. Tell us what you've shed and what's grown back. Tell us what you've decided to keep. Tell us what becoming looks like from where you are right now and the meaning you’re making amidst all the undoing and reforming.
As always, all stages welcome. So is every kind of becoming: the beautiful ones, the terrifying ones, and the ones that don't have names yet.
A Message From Guest Editor Gillian Lichota
For me, becoming emerged from rupture. Cancer interrupted the story I thought I was living — my body and identity, motherhood, career, sense of time, and the future I assumed was mine. It handed me a story I never would have chosen, with a beginning already written and no promise of how it would end. For years, I thought healing meant finding my way back to the woman I had been before cancer redrew the contours of my life. I understand it differently now. There is no going back. There is only the ongoing work of meeting myself as I am now and choosing what to carry forward and what I am ready to let go.
That is what BECOMING means to me. It is not reinvention with a tidy ending, nor is it the idea that cancer happens for a reason or somehow makes us better for having endured it. Yet profound transformation can emerge from rupture. We can honor what was lost as resilience takes root, new possibilities emerge, and life begins to take shape in ways we could not have imagined. Becoming is the slow alchemy of making something our own from a story we did not choose. It asks us to hold contradictions — to make room for grief and joy in the same breath, for fear and possibility, and for who we once were and who we have yet to become.
Nearly a decade into living with metastatic breast cancer, I am still becoming. I don’t think a final version of me is waiting somewhere ahead. There is simply this incredible life, still unfolding, and the agency I have to shape what comes next. Cancer may have written itself into my story, but the pages that follow are still mine to write. I hope this theme invites you into that space too — beyond who cancer says you are and into the messy, tender, wild truth of who you are still becoming. ~ Gillian
Gillian is a marine biologist turned nonprofit founder, running the iRise Above Foundation.
She is also a returning Wildfire Journal guest editor. See her work in our Mothers & Daughters issue.
Ready to submit your story?
We accept:
Essays: 650-1200 words
Poems: 50 line maximum
Artwork: high-resolution along with a written Artist Statement
Submission Deadline: October 25, 2026
Need more inspiration to write your story in the Wildfire Journal way? We’ve got you.
✏️Use writing prompts to unlock your story:
The version of myself I thought I was becoming before diagnosis was...
What cancer interrupted in me was not what I expected it to interrupt…
I used to define myself by...
The part of me that surprised me most under pressure was...
I am still grieving who I was becoming when...
What I have shed and what has grown back in its place...
The version of myself I'm learning to recognize...
Something I've decided to keep, no matter what...
I didn't know I was capable of... until this.
Who I am becoming is not who I expected. Here's what I know about the new me so far...
The person I was before diagnosis would not believe...
Becoming, for me, looks like this right now...
Tip: Wildfire is focused on memoir, and memoir is about writing your transformation. As you write to these prompts, try ending your piece with a silent "... and nothing was ever the same again," to see if that rings true for you. Keep digging for how your life is has changed since your diagnosis.
Remember, we are looking for cancer-related stories, so no matter where your story begins, don’t forget to include how your experience of cancer has affected you, and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Read more writing tips here.
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