Call For Submissions (November Salon) - All Compensated

Does AI have a place in creative work?

We compensate all submissions. $50 for featured Paid subscribers, 3-months free subscription for featured free subscribers ($30 value), free Salon ticket for everyone who submits a piece for consideration ($14.95 value).

You can find all the details about how the Salon works, and the benefits of participation here.

You can read The Salon Digest (the most recent Salon News & Updates) here.

If you are ready to submit you can submit here.

The Things I’m Protecting (And Why They All Require a Body)

I was working with my AI thinking partner, Claude (I call her Sage because Claude felt too masculine and I only hire women), on organizing research for my “Room Where it Happens” essay. She’d pulled together articles, identified themes, suggested structures. Helpful. Efficient.

Then she offered: “I can draft the opening paragraph based on these themes if you’d like.”

My whole body said nope. Not “no thank you” or “maybe later.” Just nope.

You don’t get to do the fun stuff, lady, that’s my bit. What will you ask to do next, kiss my husband? (Whoops. That escalated.)

But here’s the thing—I couldn’t articulate why that felt like crossing a line when letting her organize my chaotic thoughts did not. I use AI every day. I’m not precious about it. I’ve let her help with research, brainstorming, even grammar polishing when I’m too tired to care about comma splices. So why did the writing offer feel like a violation? Maybe even a threat?

Where exactly is the line for using this tool in creative work? And why does the line keep moving?

The Things I’m Protecting

The initial messy thinking. That moment when I’m staring through a rain-soaked window, or lying in my bubble-soaked bath, and something clicks. When two unrelated ideas collide and create something that didn’t exist before. Sage can’t have that. That’s mine. If I lost that brain space, I honestly wouldn’t have much left. My daily life revolves around messy thinking. If I handed that over to get tied neatly into pretty bows, I’d lose my purpose.

The specific word choice that sounds like me. Anyone who reads my work knows I have verbal tics. Parenthetical asides. Capital letters For Emphasis. “Here’s the thing” and “my heroine” and occasionally an f-bomb. It’s called having a voice. If AI takes my writing voice? It steals my purpose.

The stories only I can tell. Sage doesn’t know about the time I sold my business for the kind of numbers I’d never imagined, and struggled through three months of near-total incapacitating anxiety because I was convinced I was going to screw it up. She doesn’t know what my daughter’s smile looks like when she’s dancing in the kitchen to Mamma Mia while working dough through the pasta machine. She doesn’t know how it feels to watch the sunset from a train window in Scotland while questioning everything I thought I knew about my work.

The connections only my brain makes. That thing where I’m reading about narrative structure and somehow it connects to olive groves in Puglia which connects to something my husband said last Tuesday which suddenly becomes an entire essay about identity. That’s a human brain that’s lived a specific life making meaning from the debris.

The decision about what matters. AI can generate seventeen possible angles. What it can’t do is just know which one is true. Only I know which essay to write. Only I can understand which one will land in your chest and make you think differently.

The Daughter Who Saw This Coming

Ten years ago, my daughter called from 3,000 miles away (she waited until I was in Paris) to tell me she wasn’t going to college. She had been accepted to a prestigious Dramatic Writing program, won a significant merit scholarship, and had decided she was throwing it all away to... make pastries?

I panicked. She had Talent (yes, with a capital “T”). She could write, direct, create. And she wanted to work in a kitchen?

It was a real “face your parenting” moment. For her entire life we’d been telling her to choose what made her happy. Now she was telling us baking made her happy, and we were desperate to tell her she was making the wrong choice. Cultural conditioning runs deep, people.

She chose work that requires a body. And watching her friends with writing degrees scrolling LinkedIn for ‘content strategist’ positions that barely exist anymore, I understand what she saw coming that I didn’t. She works with her hands, creates something people can taste and touch, builds skills that exist in the physical world.

She didn’t choose embodiment as a strategy. She chose it because joy trumped strategy, economics, safety, reliability and all the other things our generations were taught to worship.

What I’m Figuring Out

The things I’m most fiercely protecting aren’t just the “creative” parts of my process. They’re the embodied parts. The parts that require me to have lived a specific life, in a specific body, with specific people, in specific places, noticing specific things that no algorithm encountered in its training data.

I’m a digital nomad constantly encountering the physical world in new ways. Sage has never lost herself in the medina in Morocco watching old men bash copper bowls into shape just as they’ve been doing in that same spot for hundreds of years. She’s never felt the bone prodding bumpiness of cobblestones under thin sneakers walking up the hill to her favourite restaurant in the fortified hilltop town of Compiano, Italy. She’s never stood on the edge of the port of Porec, Croatia, and noticed how the view feels weirdly similar to the view from the ocean patio in her home in The Bahamas, thousands of miles away.

To inform my creative practice, I’ve started a project I’m calling “practicing noticing.” I’m documenting moments to keep myself present, focused and embodied. I’ll be collecting (and perhaps posting) photos that capture these moments. Not the “look at my perfect life” aesthetic bullcrap. I’m documenting the actual moments when I see something and think, “Huh,” or even better when I feel something and want to remember.

The way the morning light makes my coffee cup cast a specific shadow just after I’ve felt the satisfaction of completing an “on the road” workout (Oh, Heroine… It’s so freakin’ tough to keep up with an “on the road” workout). The pattern of the clouds when I’m staring into the sky missing home and my big bath. The outfit of a woman who makes me feel vicariously joyful that self-expression exists.

Noticing requires a body. Making meaning from what you notice requires a life lived. Translating that meaning into something that resonates with other humans who’ve also lived lives in bodies? That’s creative work that can’t be automated.

The Real Question

Maybe the question isn’t “Does AI have a place in creative work?”

Maybe it’s “What creative work are you doing that’s so algorithmic, AI could do it?”

And if the answer scares you, maybe the response isn’t to ban the tool, but to use it to make space for more human work. Work that requires you to have a body, to have lived, to have noticed things in the physical world that no one else has noticed in quite the same way.

Work that requires you to be here.

This Month’s Salon

Does AI Have a Place in Creative Work?

I don’t have the answer. I’m figuring it out as I go, protecting some things fiercely and handing others over without guilt. The line keeps moving. I’m still working out what gets protected and why.

That’s exactly the kind of thinking I want to read in your submissions.

Not answers or resolutions. Just smart people wrestling with the most interesting question of our moment: what makes your work irreplaceably yours?

My bet? It has something to do with the fact that you’re made of meat and bone and breath, and you’ve been somewhere AI has never been.

You’ve been alive.

Submission deadline: November 15, 2025
Salon date: November 20, 2025 at noon EST

Submit your essay here.