Call For Submissions (Paid/Compensated)

The Story Room Salon & Magazine: The Threshold Guardian Edition

Welcome to The Story Room Salon & Magazine, and the conversation that gathers around all of it. Most of what happens here is free. The participatory layer — monetary prizes, live feedback, the writers’ table is for paid subscribers who want a seat at the table, not just a view of the room.

The Story Room is open.

Most midlife reinvention treats your life as one big giant transformation. One blow, one go, poof, everything is fixed, and you are a new you. You’ve eaten, prayed, and loved, or you’ve strayed wild (see what I did there) - and now you are a sparkling new person ready to tackle this thing we call a midlife crisis (even though it isn’t). But the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. There’s more than one central journey; there are lots of mini-ones. There could be four or five journeys running at once, and they might all be at different stages. Maybe you are on the road of trials in your marriage, you’re up against a threshold guardian at your work, or you are refusing the call of your body. I’m here to suggest that you cannot think your way through these heroines’ adventures. You have to write your way through them.

Some of you write through morning pages. Some of your scrawl in your journal every evening. Many of you download and complete the available Questbooks. Some of you make it through by writing a piece worth sending out.

This is the invitation to do the last one.

I’m offering the Story Room Magazine & Salon as part of the practice to write through the stages of your multitude of midlife journeys.

This is the first call for submissions. The Story Room is a quarterly literary magazine of fiction and personal essays by midlife women writing from inside a life in transition. Issue One drops August 1. The Salon follows on August 16. It’s a live quarterly gathering where selected writers from the issue come into the room to talk about their work, plus every attendee is there (speaker or lurker) to interrogate and discuss the theme. Every writer who submits gets a seat at the Salon. Prize winners and featured writers are invited to speak.

We publish writers regardless of your Substack subscriber count, your social media presence, or your training or qualifications.

The theme: Threshold Guardians

Every door worth opening has someone (or sometimes even something) standing in front of it. And if you are living more than one story at once, you are meeting more than one Guardian at a time. They do not queue up politely or knock at the door asking to come in and guard the other side. The guardians arrive together. You’ll find them at the kitchen table, waking you up in the middle of the night, and maybe in the silence after a demanding parent or friend hangs up the phone.

In story, it goes like this. You’ve heard the call to adventure, you’ve resisted the call, you embarked upon your journey, and just as you are about to cross into the new world,

BAM,

a Threshold Guardian.

Maybe it’s the boss who won’t recommend you because they are afraid of how they’d manage if you moved on. Or maybe it’s the secretly jealous friend who tells you going back to school at your age would be embarrassing. Or very often, it’s the voice in your own head that says: not yet, not you, not like that.

You see them in fiction all the time. The literal, like fluffy the three-headed dog guarding the trap door in Harry Potter. The care-coded, like Mother Gothel in Tangled, keeping her own daughter locked in a tower. The self as a guardian, like Elizabeth Bennet’s pride in Pride and Prejudice. Or even an inanimate object, like the doorknob in Alice in Wonderland.

The trick of the Threshold Guardian (the secret that we are all so afraid to admit to ourselves) is that she is not your enemy. She has an important and valid job: to test you. She will only guard a door if there is something on the other side worth getting to. Your challenge is to figure out how badly you want what’s on the other side and figure out a way to tame that dragon. Sometimes she becomes an ally. Sometimes you have to get into her skin to get past her. Sometimes the challenge is wrestling with your own mind.

For women, the most powerful Threshold Guardians have been internalized over the years of existing within the patriarchy. And they almost always have the same job: keeping us in supporting roles.

For this issue of The Story Room. I want to read about your Threshold Guardians. They could be yours, someone else’s, one you became, or one you finally got past. You can write fiction or a personal essay (there’s a prize for each). The connection to the theme can be oblique. We trust the writer.

(If you want more on the concept, here’s the piece where I wrote about my own — the man who bought my company and almost made me quit before the cheque cleared.)

What we’re looking for

Real writing (no AI screeds, thank you). We’d like specific, honest, alive on the page. Pieces that earn their endings. Pieces that a reader can’t put down without thinking about them again later.

Not: polished-but-empty prose, pieces that explain themselves, pieces that perform transformation without inhabiting it.

The piece does not have to be about your Threshold Guardian. It has to be about a Threshold Guardian. It can be yours, your character’s (if you are writing fiction), your mother’s, the one that ate your twenties, the one you are looking at right now, and pretending you can’t see. Any of them.

The details

• Length: 1,500–3,500 words

• Form: Fiction or personal essay

• Paid subscribers: Submit May 17th - June 1st. Your work is read first.

• All subscribers: Submit June 1–30

• Deadline: Midnight Eastern, June 30. No exceptions.

• Format: Google Doc (WITH comment access), double-spaced, 12pt

• File naming: [Last Name] – [Title] – [Fiction or Essay]

The tiers

• 🏆 Prize Winners

  • One fiction winner, one essay winner

    • Paid Subscribers: $150 each.

    • Free Subscribers: Annual Subscription to The Heroine Society

    • Plus: Featured Writer in The Story Room Salon. Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of your piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of me reading your piece aloud, followed by a conversation with you about the work. Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

  • Two runners-up per category:

    • Paid Subscribers: $50 each.

    • Free Subscribers: 3 Month Subscription to The Heroine Society

    • Plus: Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

• ✦ Featured Pieces

  • Additional submissions selected for publication. Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website. Unpaid in year one. You can opt in on the form if you desire.

  • Access to all paid features for this issue (Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of the piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of a conversation with the author for participation and discussion. Free PDF version of the magazine.

• Honorable Mentions

  • Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

  • Access to all paid features for this issue (Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of the piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of a conversation with the author for participation and discussion. Free PDF version of the magazine.

Every submission gets read. Every writer who submits is part of how this room comes alive.

Writing the piece is itself a way of getting past a Guardian. Publication is not necessarily the point.

You can read the full Submission Guidelines here.

I can’t wait to read what you write.

Join The Society.

Paid subscribers get invited to the quarterly Story Room Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers, plus the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus access to all recordings.

Submit your fiction or essays to the Magazine for paid publication (top selections include a shared interview with me about your work).

Plus: Midlife Elsewhere (weekly dispatch, thinking still wet on the page) and downloadable Quests to do the work on paper.

$9.95/month · $90/year