Get featured in The Midst: Seeking inspiring women in their 40s and 50s for our editorial interview program
Are you a woman in your 40s or 50s? Are you building a brand or business, carving out a niche, or changing the world in some shape or form? We want to tell your story — and our community wants to read it.
The opportunity
Build your personal brand with a long-form editorial interview (~1,000-1,600 words). We’ll publish your interview on the-midst.com and The Midst Substack. We specialize in telling stories about women innovating in the arts, tech, publishing, women’s health, and entrepreneurship.
How it works
One of our writer-editors will conduct a brief interview with you (via Zoom) and also send questions for you to answer in a Google Doc or via email. The writer-editor will write an introduction, copy-edit the Q&A conversation, select feature quotes, and share the piece with you for review before we publish. Our editorial directors, Amy Cuevas Schroeder and Laurie White, will do a final edit and consult on SEO keyword strategy.
From there, we’ll publish on the-midst.com as well as The Midst Substack. We’ll promote your profile in our newsletter and our social media.
SEO consult: Let’s help you get found in Google Search
Let’s talk about your content strategy goals. For example, are you hoping to rank highly for your name and a particular search term in Google? Or perhaps you’re hoping to build your brand as “the leading [fill in the blank] in [X city.” We’ll use SEMRush to advise on they keywords and phrases to incorporate into your story.
About The Midst audience
The Midst readers are primarily American women in their 40s. Read more about our reader demographics and what makes them tick in our reader survey summary.
- Nearly 70% are in their 40s
- 48% live in an urban environment; 38% in the suburbs
- 62% are married; 15% are loving their single life
- 53% are seasoned or advanced in their careers; 24% have made a career change
- 53% are experiencing perimenopause; 16% have reached menopause
- 51% are raising children; 22% are partnered and child-free; 18% have kids out of the house / empty nest
About our editorial team
Our team of writers and editors have decades of experience in journalism, publishing, content strategy for companies including Mom 2.0, MTV Networks, and Oprah Winfrey. Our founder, Amy Cuevas Schroeder, has worked previously as a content leader for Etsy, Minted, West Elm, and has written for NYLON, Pitchfork, New York Observer, Venus Zine (the magazine she founded back in the day), and more.
Next steps
Please email amy@the-midst.com to get the ball rolling.
Examples of interviews on The Midst
Samantha Dion Baker on drawing and journaling as therapy
On Samantha Dion Baker’s homepage, you’ll see her in the background of a city street, taking up little space, going unnoticed, while intensely focused downward, sketchbook and pencil in hand. As you arrow through her recent creative works, each coming off the page in vivid color and feeling, you can see that art is the medium that allows her to be fully seen in the world. And then, you want to see more of her through her work.
Growing up in a family of artists, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The Cooper Union, and spending more than 20 years as a graphic designer, Samantha has always lived in a creative space. And now, in her 40s, she works as an independent illustrator, artist, and author. Her artwork first garnered widespread appreciation on Instagram, where she regularly shares inspiration and beauty with her 100,000 followers. This success led to her first book in 2018, Draw Your Day, an instructional guide to art journaling, with many ideas on how to get started.
Emily McDowell on menopause awareness, releasing the drama, and leaning into the messy middle
You’ve probably seen Emily McDowell’s brilliant cards; maybe you’ve bought a bunch for family and friends, or shared her always on-point wisdom on social media. Em & Friends (previously Emily McDowell Studio) has transformed the greeting card and stationery industry since its 2012 founding with cards and products for the messy, hard, funny, beautiful relationships people really have. Emily founded the company in 2012, and quickly became well-known for her empathy cards, that ditched the typical platitude-filled traditional sympathy cards for more raw and honest acknowledgements of grief and loss.
The Woolfer’s Nina Lorez Collins shares some of the best aging and perimenopause advice on the Internet
It’s funny — OK, not so funny, but interesting — how so many frustrating experiences inspire people to embark on a whole new path or start a business. In Nina Lorez Collins’ case, her 2015 experience of failing to find helpful information about perimenopause was a big part of what led her to start The Woolfer, the thriving community for women over 40.
Now 51, Lorez Collins — a former book agent who lives in New York — not only owns her midlife experience, but she empowers other women to live their best lives, flaws and all.
Here she talks about the highlights of being 50-plus, building her business as a creative, and how much she’s changed since her divorce.
Our bodies, our selvages: Sonya Philip teaches how to sew your own way
Talk about liberating. Sonya Philip remembers the exact moment when she said, “Fuck it. This is who I am. I’m going to honor my true, whole self and tell the world about it.”
In November 2007, she posted a photo of herself on a Flickr group called Wardrobe Remix and wrote:
This is something I have been meaning to do. That and get over my dreaded fear of self-portraits and photos of myself, especially ones where “I look fat.”
Well I am fat. And no amount of disguising or body dysmorphia will change that.
So here’s to having fun with what I have instead of waiting until I lose all that pregnancy/college/teenage/baby fat.
Now 47 in 2021, the San Francisco–based designer not only honors her true self, she’s shaped her career around empowering others to do the same. In 2012, Sonya sewed 100 outfits for herself, documenting the experience in a project called 100 Acts of Sewing. The following year she started teaching classes, released her first pattern, and the rest is herstory.
Now Sonya has a book that combines her self-made creative talents. The Act of Sewing: How to Make and Modify Clothes to Wear Every Day is an in-depth guide to sewing simple garments — with four full-size patterns and all the tricks of alteration and embellishment explained so that you can make a wardrobe all your own.
Lesley Ware’s major life transition, Bumble success story, and fashion as self-care
How does one be happy, hurting, growing, and healing simultaneously?”
Good question, right? These are the jumbles that Lesley Ware, now 42, started working through when she turned 40. At the time, the author and educator was going through what she describes as a “major life transition”. Lesley was recently separated and starting therapy to work through issues she’d been grappling with for a few months, including splitting with her partner of 10 years, money anxiety, and much-needed fibroid surgery.
But Lesley was also celebrating falling in love again, with her now-husband, comedian and television producer Victor Varnado. “It was gutting to mourn a relationship of many years while starting a new one,” she says from home in Ridgewood, Queens. “When my ex-husband and I parted ways, for the first few months, I was in bad shape mentally and physically.”
Thought about group coaching? Meet Badass Rebellion, the new movement for women in middle age
In late 2020, Avery Hoenig, Jamie Wilson, and Lucy Smith — longtime friends and practicing psychologists — met for brunch and ended up kicking off a conversation that hasn’t stopped yet. Full of pandemic pent-up social energy, they started catching up, sharing notes, and talking about the boatload of life stuff they felt pressured to magically manage, especially as moms. Their own mental health struggles were mirroring many of their clients’ and fortysomething friends’.
But there was one throughline that linked much of the overwhelm, loneliness, and downright exhaustion: Women are doing everything for everyone else and putting themselves deadass last. To help change this — and have some fun too — the trio started their first creative collaboration: Inspiration from the Couch, a podcast that’s going strong two years and over 75 episodes later.
In 2022, they expanded their reach with Badass Rebellion, a midlife group coaching and online resource to help women break out from the narratives, expectations, and self-defeating habits so they can find more joy, connection, and adventure during what could be a peak time in life.
Got questions?
Let’s talk! For more information, email Amy Cuevas Schroeder at amy@the-midst.com.
Learn more about how we’re building The Midst: the gateway drug to the modern 40-something experience.
