March 2025 Newsletter

The Champagne Room
Mar 15
3 min read

This journal--as a project, as a tether, as a piece of my identity--is something to which I am always returning; editing this journal is coming home. It's funny, then, to think that this thing that has anchored me in its own sweet way for the last six years has found its home in so many different places--different houses, different neighborhoods, across state lines, carried everywhere I go. Some of y'all have been with us for awhile and know from these letters (or pre-newsletter lore) that The Champagne Room began in a bar in Athens, Georgia. My former partner and I would carve out time and space on Sunday evenings to sit in a booth and drink beer and eat hotdogs and create a literary journal. We came to these meetings with a frenetic energy and were easily distracted and often drunk, and we were ambitious and obstinate and within all of these overlapping conditions, Issue 01 was born.

Those of you who have been with us for awhile also know that my former partner in editing this journal was also my former partner in life and in love and we lived together in a house in Athens and we were married and we are not married any longer and I do not live in that house or in Athens anymore. That is all part of another story being written elsewhere, and just a chapter in this journal's coming to be; we all have parents, and some of them don't speak. In the years since its conception, The Champagne Room has blossomed into something I never imagined it would be in its early days, something so full of love and light and wrenching, spectacular writing; it has become a space both physical and virtual: it remains a print journal because we want the words of our writers to be held in your hands, and has developed to include an online space where we can share the words of our writers beyond their contributions, support them by recognizing their brilliance beyond the page--what got them there, what keeps them going. I am grateful for my co-editor, Emma, for continuing to put so much time and care into these contributor conversations--she says she is a grouch but I have never met another person as warm and genuinely interested in connecting with others as she is; she makes people feel welcome, valued, seen.

There have been starts and stops and stops and starts over and over again in this journal's lifespan. There have been transformations, expansions, pauses, resets; there was one version and then another and through it all, even through my need to step away for a minute and take a breath and then turn around and look back at this space from another angle--even when my life was crashing and even as both my life and Emma's life remain so chaotic and bustling and lovely and full, even as we move slower than we did the first time around, we give each other grace, and we keep moving, and every time I pause for just one second and look at what we've done and what we are doing I am honored so many writers have trusted us with their work, I am proud. Issue 04 is no exception--of the work in these forthcoming pages, again, as always, I am honored, excited, proud.

The writing collected in this latest issue reimagines the idea of a container, of what it means to be contained--a simple moment in the sun, a camera set to record, a glass jar at a souvenir shop, a bingo card--all of this and more are explored in these pages, these pages you can hold in your hands the way you can wear locket around your neck, the way you can touch the traces of something and say, this, this for a moment was mine. If this sounds exciting to you, if you want to hold something good, be part of it, carry these writers' words, copies of Issue 04 are available for preorder now. We also have a bundle option available for purchase--all four existing copies of The Champagne Room for the price of three.

So much more is coming soon--more contributor conversations, more news. Thanks for sticking with us all these years. We are so happy to still be here with something good and new.

Love and Light,

Heather

Founder and Co-Editor, The Champagne Room

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