Announcing... The Story Room Magazine & Book Club

The Story Room - A community for midlife women writers and readers.

There is a specific kind of room writers know. It’s like the Wee Hoose in my back garden in Scotland (which is pretty damn near perfect if you ask me). It’s the one with the pink velvet swirly chair that holds my heated blanket. It’s the one where the book you needed in your twenties is still sitting on the shelf, dog-eared and filled with Post It notes. It’s the one where someone is always reading (me) and someone is always thinking (me) and nobody is performing (me). Although I love my Wee Hoose, and the occasional visits there from my husband who brings me cups of tea and sometimes steals the plug for the lawnmower, all that me time can get pretty lonely. But it’s a fabulous room, so I try to build a version of it wherever I travel (which as you know, is all over the damn place). The Wee Hoose is also, it turns out, the room I have been trying to build inside this publication for some time now.

So I’m naming it.

The Story Room Magazine and Book Club. The Story Room still brings together the same friends (all you wise midlife women launching your second coming-of-age) in the same place, but this will be the more literary strand for writers and non-writers alike. It will focus on fiction and personal essays, for writers and readers. It’s for the women in this room who have been writing their way through a chapter and want a place serious enough to put the work down on the table.

Here’s what it is and what it isn’t.

The Magazine

The Story Room Magazine publishes subscriber-written fiction and personal essays under one editorial lens: midlife women writing from inside a life in transition. Both forms welcome.

Submissions are open to all subscribers, free and paid. Paid subscribers get a two-week early submission window when each call opens; submissions then open to all readers for the remaining time. Paid submissions are read first; remaining slots open to all.

Each quarterly issue is structured in three tiers:

• Prize Winners. One fiction winner and one essay winner per quarter, with two runners-up in each category. These writers are compensated.

• Featured Pieces. Additional submissions selected for publication. Bylines, no prize money yet (until we grow a bit more). Submitters opt in, so you don’t have to publish if you don’t get paid.

• Honorable Mentions. Every submission that meets the guidelines is named in the issue with a link directly to the author’s Substack.

Each issue then arrives in three layers:

• The Magazine (free). The full quarterly issue is free and published here on Call for Heroines. Paid subscribers get a digital version to download.

• The Annotated Edition (paid). A recording where I take you through my notes in the margins. Not fully a critique, not only praise. An attentive reader staking a reading. “This is where she earns the ending” or “notice the setup in paragraph two.” That kind of thing.

• The Reading & Conversation (paid). A video of me reading the prize-winning pieces aloud, followed by a recorded conversation with each winning writer about the work.

It runs on a quarterly cycle: submissions open for three to four weeks, selections published in the next issue, prizes awarded at issue release.

Prizes

Paid Subscribers…
Quarterly cash prizes go to prize-winning pieces and runners-up in fiction and essay categories — $150 for each main winner, $50 per runner-up. These will increase as the community grows. The longer-term hope is for the annual grand prize to be an all-inclusive funded writing retreat. Somewhere worth the flight, somewhere I’m working on. I’ll announce when (and if) it’s ready.

Free Subscribers…
Quarterly prizes are Annual Heroine Society Subscription for main winner, 3-month subscription per runner-up.

The Book Club

Once a month, my friend Julie (the book drunkard) and I meet on Substack Live and talk about a book. We are not interviewing each other or running a syllabus. We’re two friends who have been talking about books for many years and have decided to do it where people can listen.

Each book is announced four to five weeks ahead so subscribers can read along. The live conversation is free to watch. Paid subscribers can join the chat with questions during the event, and the archive lives behind the paywall.

We did not invent the book club. Anne Hutchinson did, in Boston in 1634, and got banished for it. (Or was it Jane Cunningham Croly in New York after she was barred from a male-only press dinner for Charles Dickens?) Either way, we’ll all be part of a 400-year lineage of women getting in trouble for talking about books together. We are simply turning a long-running literary friendship into a community you can join.

The first book and date will be announced in a separate post very soon.

Why now

The shortest answer is that the Call for Heroines trajectory (and all of you) steered me in this direction.

The longer answer is that I hold a creative writing PhD, have written seven novels, and have spent the better part of my adult life thinking about how stories work (it’s where the Heroine’s Adventure came from). The PhD has always been there, in the room next door, waiting to be opened. This is me opening it.

I will admit, briefly and only once, the imposter question (because, yes, I am still trying to karate chop my imposter syndrome but I keep missing)…

Who am I to curate other people’s fiction? Why my reading?

There are credentialed editors at every corner of Substack. I know. I’m not running an MFA. I am creating a Wee Hoose, with a specific lens, for a specific group of women, with serious editorial attention from a reader who has spent a long time thinking about story structure as the architecture of a life. The PhD is a tool, not a badge. It’s the lived experience (building, exiting, walking back into the creative life) that’s the credential for this specific curatorial position.

Now I’ve admitted I’m an imposter, we can move on.

What else lives here

Alongside the Magazine and the Book Club, The Story Room is also:

• Fiction. Notes from the novels I’m currently writing. Short stories, maybe.

• Marginalia. Craft notes, and book chat for writers and people who care how stories are made on the page and in a life.

• Occasional invited pieces. Writers I admire, brought into the room as guests.

What happens next

The Story Room is launching across this summer.

• Now. I’m publishing my own fiction and craft notes. The Marginalia stream is live. You’ll see the name The Story Room appearing more often in the post subtitles (I label my lanes now).

• May 20th. First call for submissions opens. Theme, format, word count, and prize structure published with the call. (One hint… the inaugural theme is a single word, and it works equally for fiction or essay.)

• August 1. First quarterly Magazine drops. Annotated Edition, video reading, and conversation roll out across the rest of August.

• November 1, February 1, May 1. Subsequent issues follow on the same quarterly cadence.

You don’t need to do anything yet. If you want to be in the room when submissions open, stay subscribed. If you want the early submission window, downloadable Magazine, the Annotated Editions, video readings, the Book Club archive, and eligibility for the annual retreat prize, the paid tier is the door.

That’s the whole thing.

I have been quietly building The Story Room (your Wee Hoose) for the last six months. It is the most literal version of what this publication has always been about: women writing their way through, with someone paying attention to the writing.

Welcome to The Story Room. Bring something you’ve been working on. Or just sit down and read.

Want all the paid goodies and early access to the submission calls?