Our speaker this evening was also our guest speaker in December of 2020. The topic and the venue were a bit different this time, though. Back then it was an online meeting and the topic was on Ghost Writing. But now Amy Iori is the Editor in Chief at Suburban Living Magazine.
Amy is a graduate of Apex High School and has a degree from the UNC Linguistics school. She has over 30 years of experience as a freelance writer including having written the memoirs os Col. Hal Shook. In 2016 she received her first copy of Suburban Living Magazine and read it cover to cover. Having seen a few errors and she wrote a letter to the editor offering her expertise to help edit articles. A relationship was made and eventually lead us to where she is today.
She began as a writer for the magazine and her first two stories were on the renovation of Apex High School and the Apex Prom Shop run by the Apex United Methodist Church. As of now she has published more than 85 stories! As the magazine grew she took on more of a proofing and editing role rather than writing herself. By 2020 they were getting more organized and needed to find stories so she took on that role as well which eventually lead to her becoming the Editor in Chief.
Suburban Living is published every other month in Apex and Fuquay-Varina and quarterly in Holly Springs. This means there are almost always publishing deadlines looming for at least one of the editions and some tight schedules. It is an independently owned and operated magazine so they do their best to select stories very carefully. The subjects are focused on local activities such as youth, seasonal, feel good, finance, pets, fitness, cooking and recipes, and the like. The magazine is freely distributed and is paid for by advertisements yet they still strive to keep the ratio of content to advertisements as high as possible. Amy also shared some details about the number of copies printed and distributed in each town and soem of the complexity of the production schedules. Suburban Living also publishes the Apex Chamber magazine for the Apex Chamber of Commerce.
After her presentation the members had quite a few questions which lead to healthy discussion. It is clear that Amy is very passionate about her work and the magazine and we enjoyed hearing all about it. We all learned something this evening. All three editions of Suburban Living Magazine are also available online.