Announcing... The Story Room Salon & Magazine

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

This is a Story Room post. Most content is free. The participatory layer including the live salon, paid writing opportunities, annotations and interview is for members of The Society.

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 Salon & Magazine. 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 Salon

Monthly intellectual salons for women designing themselves

Once a quarter, accomplished women gather for 90 minutes of the kind of conversations you have or wish you could have with other women. The kind where someone’s story makes you see your own life differently. The kind you’re still thinking about three days later.

This isn’t a webinar. There are no slides, no scripted takeaways, no “three steps to transform your life.”

This is a salon. Minds colliding. Ideas connecting. The kind of discourse where you leave thinking about it for days.

And in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and AI, it’s stubbornly, unapologetically human.

What’s in it for you

• 90 minutes, four times a year, of real intellectual conversation. The kind you used to have in grad school

• Other paid subscribers in the room with you (cameras on, voices in, no audience-only mode).

• Live conversation with the writers from each quarter’s Magazine, who are the same women whose work made you stop scrolling

The Two-Part Format

• Part 1 (30 minutes) — Free on YouTube. Panel discussion with the featured contributors from that quarter’s Magazine selections. I facilitate conversation about their pieces and the issue’s theme. Open to everyone. No subscription required.

• Part 2 (60 minutes) — Paid subscribers only. Intimate salon conversation on Zoom. Cameras on. Voices in. All participants can contribute, ask questions, and think out loud together. This is where the real thing happens. Recorded and archived for paid subscribers.

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 happens next

The Story Room is launching across this summer.

• 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.

• August 16. The Quarterly Salon is live!

• 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, and access to the Salon, 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?

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