The Examined Life Journal

There are presently no open calls for submissions.

Submissions should be previously unpublished works of non-fiction, fiction, or poetry, generally less than 5000 words, concerned with any aspect of healthcare and healing, illness, the human body, the human condition.

One piece of writing per submission. To submit another piece, you must fill out the form again. We will consider simultaneous submissions, but ask that authors withdraw their piece from our Submittable account immediately if their work is accepted elsewhere. Please do not send submissions in PDF form. MS Word or other comparable formats are acceptable. Any works submitted as a PDF will not be considered.

We are committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans. We reserve the right to reject any submission that we suspect to be primarily generated or created by language modeling software, ChatGPT, chat bots, or any other AI apps, bots, or software.

On a related note, we maintain an email list that is used to a) notify you of future calls for submissions, and b) keep you up to date on our yearly medical humanities conference at The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.  To do that, we ask that opt in using the form here on our website.

The Examined Life Journal