Messy Stories/The Messy Stories Network

The Messy Stories Network

Everything under the Messy Stories umbrella — the channels, the podcast, the newsletter, and the storytellers who make it messy.

Messy Stories started as one channel where two hosts sat down and reacted to the kind of story you can’t stop listening to — the affair that unravelled on a family holiday, the friend who turned out to be someone else entirely. It grew into several places that do different jobs, and this page is the map of all of them.

How a story travels

Nearly every story here starts with a real person telling it themselves, usually in parts, on their own social account. When a story stops us, we do four things in order:

1. We ask first. Nothing gets used because it was public. We reach out to the storyteller, and the ones who say no stay off every surface we run.
2. We check it. We read the whole saga end to end before committing — partly to be sure it holds together, partly because some stories are ones we decide not to tell at all. What we refuse to run is set out in our editorial policy.
3. We retell it. The written version on this site isn’t a transcript. It’s an original retelling with a timeline, context, and our own take, credited back to the person whose life it was.
4. We credit and link back. Every story page names its source and points to the original telling, so the audience we bring lands on the storyteller, not just on us.

The surfaces

For storytellers

If you tell your own stories and want them in front of a bigger audience, we work with a small roster of storytellers — with credit, a link back, and terms agreed in writing before anything runs. Corrections and removals are handled the same way for everyone: write to us on the contact page and a real person answers.

Want your story here? Become a Messy Stories storyteller.