What’s our approach?
1. You submit your real story.
You (person who identifies as a man) share a real story about your life you think will resonate with other men, or you want feedback on. Click here to submit a story.
Ideas: You can look at the Conversation Topics below for topic ideas.
Pen Names: You can use your real name or a pen name, but just please be true and honest to your experience.
2. Your story gets context:
We select stories, or excerpts of stories, that we think will be most helpful for other men to read. Click here to meet our team.
We’ll introduce your story with context on the topic if we think it’s necessary, and then leave discussion questions for readers to reflect on at the end of your piece.
We may also choose to edit or revise your story with you, mostly for clarity. We won’t try to change your tone or meaning, but we may challenge you and share with you how we expect your words may be received. Discussing changes may prompt defensiveness, confusion, hurt (or it may not), but expect that this may be a part of the healing and learning process for the author and editor, which we hope will translate to readers of the story. We will work with you directly during this process to make sure you feel comfortable with whatever gets published.
We are not “authorities” on masculinity by any means, but will support your story with our mission of helping men in mind.
We ask for support from accountability partners to make sure that we have perspectives from folks who don’t identify as men on stories that touch on sensitive topics.
3. Your story sparks a wider discussion:
We share your story as widely as we can.
We will feature your story on our site, and post it to relevant Conversation Topics. We categorize stories into Conversation Topics to help readers learn more about other mens’ experiences on a particular topic they’re interested in, whether about porn, depression, the military, frat hazing, anorexia, sexuality, bullying, drugs, or consent.
We will do our best to share your story on external sites, like Reddit, and online magazines or websites who will repost or share it to social media.
We encourage use of your story in live group discussions. We aim to connect with men’s circles who can use your story and our Discussion Guide as a prompt for in-person sharing.