Newsletter #1: 3 Invitations
On freewriting and our first prompt, Substack, and a party
Welcome to our first Midstory Newsletter! I want to give all of you the warmest of welcomes to our Midstory Magazine community.
My intention is to start each week with an update on the magazine, with a mix of telling you about our new published essays and other events and opportunities, as general as our general musings about life, midlife, and writing in general. This week I’m writing to invite you to do three things.
Many of you are brand new to our HerStories Project community. We are Jessica Smock and Stephanie Sprenger, and we “met” well over a decade ago in that active, fractious, and utterly unique world of online blogging (yes, I’m talking about the “mommy bloggers”) during the early 2010s. From there, we started our own blog, publishing stories of women’s friendship. Soon after we began teaching personal essay writing and blogging, as well as publishing essay collections (five in total).
We’ve tried a lot of new things at HerStories over the past decade, some of them successful and amazing (our writing groups that we called Small Steps begun during the early days of the Covid pandemic, some of them still going strong), others not so much (a brief, foray into the platform Mighty Networks that confused everyone). We listen to our community and listen to your needs and goals and want to evolve with you.
So that brings us to Substack and my first invitation:
Give Substack a real chance.
(If you know and love Substack already, go right ahead and skip to #2.)
From my handy Substack dashboard, I know that many of you (most?) did not have Substack accounts before signing up to join our Midstory Magazine community. First, THANK YOU. Thanks for taking a risk with us and for signing up for something new and uncertain to support midlife women’s storytelling. I’ve heard from many of you, saying, “What is a Substack? How do I do this? Is this a newsletter? A blog?”
I get the skepticism/hostility. I actively avoided understanding much about Substack for years. (Why should I bother trying to manage *yet another* online platform?) Until too many of my fellow writers (including my co-editor Stephanie) hopped on the bandwagon, and then I dug deep.
And, fellow Gen X/midlife friends, please believe me when I say that Substack is actually pretty great. It’s this perfect mix of a blogging/newsletter/community platform.
Here’s what I’m asking you to do: Open Substack on your desktop/laptop. You won’t get the best Substack experience from your phone. Fill out your profile. Check out our full site, but then look at others’. Start with our Recommended Substacks, and then look at others’ recommendations. I’ll think you’ll soon get the general vibe and I think you’ll like it. I’m hardly an expert so I’ll be learning and getting used to Substack along with you.
Write for 10 minutes.
This is my second invitation. We are big proponents of freewriting. Call it journaling, morning pages…whatever you’d like. Each of those terms mean something a big different, but what we mean is sitting down — with or without a prompt — and setting a timer and just writing, whatever comes to mind. No censoring, no editing, no judgment. This is what we do in our writing groups.
From what many of you have already told me, I know that you may not be an experienced writer. You may not have written anything *just for yourself* in decades. Or ever. And that is totally okay. You belong here with us. Or you may have published multiple books. We have women in our community on both ends of that spectrum, and lots in between. We are all the same when we sit down to a blank page or empty screen.
Here at HerStories we love these “zero drafts” — not even yet first drafts. They’re our first attempts at figuring out what we think and how to process our lives.
So today or tonight or tomorrow, or sometime during this week, get out your notebook or favorite journal or a new Word doc, and write.
Our first prompt is: “The bravest thing I’ve ever done…” Go with the first memory that pops into your head. Don’t judge it. Keep writing for 10 minutes (don’t stop!). I want to invite you to share this writing below with us. This is not a place for critique because this is not that kind of writing. We will tell you which words and sentences spoke to us, what questions we have, or how the writing made us feel.
Eventually, we will make this is a private space (just for paid subscribers), so that it feels more intimate and approachable, but for now, we would love it if you shared as much as you feel comfortable, even if it’s just a line or two.
And if you already know this is the kind of writing you like to do, our next session of our signature writing group starts on Monday, October 16th. Find out more here. We’d love to see lots of new faces!
Come to our launch party (over Zoom).
Pajamas encouraged. We’ll send out a Zoom link for a meet up on Monday, October 16th at 8 p.m. (Eastern). Mark your calendars! We will hang out, introduce each other, and talk about writing and midlife and all of its complexity, craziness, and confusion.
Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. You can always write us at jessandsteph@theherstoriesproject.com.
We can’t tell you how much it means that you’ve chosen to be a part of our new magazine. Thank you for all your support so far.
xo Jessica
Notes:
Introduce yourself in the “Introductions” thread. Don’t be scared. Tell us about you and your midlife experience.
You can submit your writing (as personal essays or an “unsent letter”) here.
Our Fall HerStories Writing group starts October 16th.
Our Midstory Magazine “launch party” is at 8 p.m. ET on October 16th.
An anonymous writer asks us to post this response: "The bravest thing I've ever done is leave my father's house.
My parents separated when I was 9 and my brother was 5
They were 27 and 30.
Yep, if you've done the math, they were 17 and 21 when I was born. They barely knew each other, but they gave it a go and did the best they could for as long as they could.
I wasn't surprised when they told us. They had been fighting and living largely separate lives for a long time. My mom took trips alone, and largely retreated to her bed when she was home. My memories are sketchy, but I recall I cried and my brother laughed when they told us.
They told us my mom would be moving out. When I tell people that now, they ask often ask me why, and I want to scream, "DON'T ASK ME! ASK HER!" No one asks her, because she doesn't tell anybody that's what she did. She lets her current friends think she was a single mother. I don't blow her cover.
At the time they told us it was because my father made more money than she did. I've come to suspect that it's because she was just kind of done being a mom. She'd just bought herself a Fiat Spider 2-seater convertible. Not the kind of car a mom who is into being a mom buys. And not the kind of car our working-class family could afford.
After she left my father descended deeper into addiction. Our house was messy. There was drug paraphernalia all over the house. Piles of newspapers. One of my jobs was to clear the beer bottles out of his car. He didn't just drive drunk, he drove while drinking. The TV was on the end of the dining room table. The carpet had holes. At one point his step brothers moved to LA form New Jersey and lived on our couch and balcony. My mom would later marry one of them, but that's another story.
When I was 15, I came home from somewhere and my brother was lying in bed crying and breathing heavily. He said our dad had hit him. For all of his drinking, drugging, gambling and other unfatherly behavior, he had never been physically abusive before.
I called my mom and told her what happened and she came and got us. We lived at her small 1-bedroom apartment. My brother and I sharing the fold-out bed and she and my step-uncle (9 years her junior, and 9 years my senior) sharing the bedroom until we found a new apartment to move to.
I didn't have the kind of friends or relationships that I could turn to for comfort or support or even just to talk to. I navigated this chaos all on my own and have only recently started talking about it to my close friends.
I don't know what would have happened to my life if I hadn't made that call."
What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done?
I don’t think of myself as brave. Like, at all. I am a very calculated person. I don’t make decisions - at least big decisions - without a lot of research, comparing pros and cons, plotting out all the what-ifs. So what does “brave” mean anyway? Doing something scary? Being terrified and doing it anyway? Yeah, so if my decisions are calculated, then they’re not so scary. I figure out what is most likely to be the best choice, and I do that. Not really scary. So what kinds of things would be scary to me? Well, the cliche heroic things - running into a burning house or jumping into a raging river to save someone. Putting myself at great risk for the benefit of someone else. I've never done that.
Maybe back when I was a good Christian I was more brave. I believed that there was a god in charge of everything who would handle all the big scary stuff for me. Well… then nothing was really scary, if God had everything under control, so was I actually brave? I don’t think so.
I’ve done some things others might find brave.
I traveled around Europe mostly by myself when I was about 20. I think my mom was more brave than I was, she was terrified for me. I was at the age where I felt invincible and optimistic about the world. I wasn’t afraid at all.
At 22 I took a job 600 miles away from home and moved away from everything I had ever known. At the beginning it was exciting and fun. It got harder after a couple years. It might seem brave, but it didn’t feel like bravery at the time.
At 25 I married a guy I’d known for less than a year. HAHAHAHAAAA it seems ridiculous to say it, but we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary this month. I don’t really recommend marrying someone you hardly know, but it’s worked out alright for us. It didn’t feel brave at the time, it felt like being young and in love.
At 31 I adopted two babies. Looking back I’d say it was brave, if I’d had any idea what I was getting myself into. But I had no idea whatsoever. It turns out they were both born with significant disabilities that didn’t become apparent until around age 3-5. Even then, the full spectrum of how those disabilities would affect our lives and our family would be learned and experienced over time. You could say it’s brave of me to keep plugging along, but I don’t have much of a choice.
At 39 I quit going to church. My departure from the religious and faith system I’d been part of my whole life was gradual, but I suppose the decision to quit church was pretty brave, although it didn’t feel brave at the time either. It just felt like something I couldn’t do anymore. I tried to go back a couple times, but it was very clear then that it was a club I could no longer be part of. I lost a lot, and it took years to process and disentangle myself from it, but I am grateful for it now.