Continuing from last week’s article, which included resources for publishing markets as well as six stories from writers on how they got into print, this week we share six more stories by writers of essays, children’s books, short fiction, nonfiction books, magazine articles and radio commentary.  These writers discuss the way they made connections with publishers and editors.  Two of the writers are themselves editors and discuss submissions from their side of the desk.

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Nancy Levinson
Nancy Levinson, who has written many books for children, feels that she started her career as a newspaper reporter in junior and senior high school.  She studied journalism at the University of Minnesota, moved to New York and worked for a small town newspaper called the Westchester Daily Item.  For a year, she covered the police beat, selectman meetings, fires and accidents. She also wrote feature stories, often inspired by her love of reading. One lead for a feature on summer reading came from seeing kids’ bicycles strewn over the library’s front lawn as the kids spent time inside. When the Berlin wall came down, she went to Berlin and freelanced for the United Press International office.

After her return to NY, a move to Los Angeles and the birth of her children, Nancy started to write nonfiction for children’s magazines. She found herself wondering about the things she said or read to her children.  For instance, once she asked herself, “Is there really something called a bookworm?” and found that there are worms that get into books and live in libraries.  She wrote about that. Learning that the blue whale is the biggest creature living on earth, about the length of five pick up trucks, she wrote about that, too.  Eventually, she published essays about her own teenage life and her sisters in Girl and Teen Magazine.  She also used the interesting things she was finding out about in other markets.  She used information about Emma Lazarus and how her poetry came to be on the Statue of Liberty for a newspaper piece. She read columns on the opinion page of the Los Angeles Times, and if one struck a chord, she called the editors to ask if they might be open to other pieces on that topic.  When submitting to the Times, she always sent a cover letter with some information about her publications.  Once, when she saw that American Heritage Magazine was doing a regular column called, “My Brush with History,” she wrote about her experience as a reporter in Germany.  Nancy is an avid reader and that keeps her aware of markets.  She continues to publish books for children as well as opinion pieces in the LA Times. Her advice to those who want to publish is to engage the reader and build in good beginnings and middles, as well as snappy endings.

Susan Luzader
Journalist Susan Luzader began publishing humorous essays when she lived in Denver and wrote for a Littleton, CO paper.  Later, she put together an arts section for the Canyon Courier in nearby Evergreen and wrote essays about the arts. She enjoyed having people in a small town stop her on the street and tell her they enjoyed her writing. When she moved to Arizona, she did freelance reporting for the Arizona Republic and got assignments for a weekly section of the paper covering southern Arizona.

 After her kids were in junior high school, she started writing personal essays and began submitting them to The Desert Leaf, a monthly local paper with a circulation of 53,000.  The paper pays upon publication, but she often has to wait several issues until they have the right spot for her essay. She has published essays in other magazines as well, including Arizona Highways and Personal Journaling Magazine. Married to an MD who is a pain specialist, she has also co-authored a book about managing pain.

Susan believes that classes and writing groups help writers stay unstuck.   She also advises writers to stay active in their community and note what touches their hearts. For instance, Susan is currently working with the siblings of chronically or terminally ill children.  She gets together weekly with a 13-year-old girl she met through this program. The girl wants to be a writer, and she and Susan talk about books and go to movies.  Because she is enjoying this relationship a great deal, Susan believes that the mentorship will lead to an essay on “having a daughter after raising sons.”

Marilyn Meyer
Seattle local NPR commentator Marilyn Meyer began her on-the-air success through a friend who was interning for a Tacoma, Washington NPR station.  The friend knew that Marilyn was writing short personal essays while her high school students wrote in class and said she thought the Tacoma station would like them.  She gave Marilyn contact information for the station manager, who made cuts and changes Marilyn didn’t agree with; however, Marilyn did get the opportunity to record two essays.  Ultimately, she began noticing more and more local voices on the Seattle NPR station, especially on the Week Day program.  She left a message for the program’s producers about the material she wrote.  They contacted her with interest in her pieces about the life of a single parent, teacher and observer of the world. She sent the pieces she had done for the Tacoma station.  They liked them and she began reporting to the Seattle studio twice a month before school to record.  She received voice coaching in the studio and often taped two pieces at a time.  She started to think in three-minute chunks, 600 words.  She saw episodes in her life yielding small epiphanies.  In 1998, when the NEA cut funding, and NPR reduced the Week Day program, the producers dropped the commentaries.  Now there is more funding, and after Marilyn ran into the producer at a book fair, she received an invitation to tape more essays, and at a bookstore reading given by NPR’s Noah Adams, she introduced herself as a KUOW writer in Seattle who wanted to know how to send work to NPR’s national offices.  Noah Adams said all work has to be solicited, but he would solicit it from her.

For Marilyn, the broadcasts led to many opportunities, including becoming a language arts specialist in the public schools and a writing specialist for the clients of a college counselor.  She went on to publish essays in a local parenting magazine and edited two books. She wrote an essay about vacations for Simple Living Magazine and reviewed Random Acts of Kindness for the magazine; now she does copy and style editing for the publication.

Brenda Miller
Essayist Brenda Miller started marketing her essays by reading everything she could to find venues where her work fit. The first essay she published was in The Seattle Weekly, a hometown paper. She thought her piece, “Prologue to a Sad Spring,” would fit in the paper’s back page personal essay slot and sent it in. The first national publication that took her work was The Georgia Review.  She had written essays modeled on poet Albert Goldbarth’s braided, lyric essays, published in that magazine.  “If you have writers you admire and learn from, the magazines that accept their work may be interested in yours,” Brenda says.  Since that publication in The Georgia Review, she has won three Pushcart Prizes, co-written a text about writing creative nonfiction, Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, and had her work appear in several anthologies, retrospectives and periodicals including The Sun, Utne Reader, Yoga Journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and Creative Nonfiction.  She finished a PhD program in creative writing at the University of Utah, as well.

Brenda began collecting her book of essays, entitled Season of the Body, published by Sarabande Books, as a PhD student.  Her goal was to graduate with a version of a book.  She submitted the manuscript to the Associated Writing Programs’ annual contest and talked with editors at Graywolf Press and Norton, the extremes of regional and national presses.  She made a point of meeting editors at professional conferences.  When the lyric essay editor of The Seneca Review solicited one of her essays after reading her work in other journals, he also talked with the publisher at Sarabande, who he knew wanted to add essays to their publication list of poetry and short fiction collections.  After The Seneca Review editor passed Brenda’s name on to Sarabande, Brenda contacted them.  The editor there encouraged her to send her manuscript of essays and then had suggestions for some revisions.  A few months later, she accepted Brenda’s revised manuscript for publication.

Currently, Brenda is editor of The Bellingham Review.  As an editor, her advice is:

Follow submission guidelines carefully.  If a magazine asks for literary essays, don’t send science fiction. Be sure you address your submission to the current editor (use writers’ guidelines to get the information, not an old copy of the magazine). Include a cover letter that is short and sweet and says who you are and if you are published and why you are submitting your work to this magazine. Do not summarize your piece.  Make sure there are no typos and that the first paragraph is perfect or the editors might not read beyond it.  Also make sure the last paragraph is strong because they may skip to it to see if the writing goes somewhere.  Don’t end with anything like, “And then I woke up and found it was all a dream.” Sometimes editors (in her case, she and two graduate students) will send suggestions to a writer about how to make a piece better, but can’t always do so.

On the topic of essay collections, because they are hard to publish in the mainstream presses, Brenda emphasizes looking at small presses and developing a pitch about what your book is about. “It can’t just be occasional pieces.  It must have a cohesive thread that you see as you put the essays together.”

Lauren Smith
Lauren Smith’s book from Writer’s Digest Books is Unsent Letters:  Writing as a Way to Resolve and Renew.  The book is an outgrowth of her seven years editing the journal Messages from the Heart, a quarterly publication of letters that nurtured understanding between people.  When Lauren considered submissions for her journal, she asked whether there was an element of hope in them.  Although they might be serious and about difficult topics, the possibility of resolution and release of feelings in the letters was important to her.  Length was also a consideration, with 800 words being a maximum.  When writers ignored the length limit, she had to send the work back with apologies saying it didn’t fit her journal.  She believes it is up to the writer to follow the guidelines.  Once in awhile, she did send a handwritten note with suggestions, but it was impossible to do that very often.  Sometimes she said that she would consider another letter with part of the former letter in it.  Most of the time, those authors got back to her.  She started the journal because she had been doing commercial writing delivering messages that were not her own. With a dip in the economy, businesses were using fewer freelance writers for brochures and reports and she had the time to create a journal that she felt offered voices she admired and felt close to.  She refused to use advertising and although the journal broke even, she didn’t make money.  The effort led, however, to the contract for Unsent Letters and deep satisfaction–all the years she edited, she felt astonished to get beautiful writing in the mail.  She also published her own essays at the beginning of each issue of Messages from Heart.

“The letter form allows you to sit down and write without worrying about how to get into what you want to say. It’s a quick way over a speed bump,” Lauren says.  And she believes there is a market for letters in anthologies with themes—i.e. letters about connections between mothers and daughters.  If you come across a chance to submit an essay in letter form, Lauren thinks that you may be able to effectively change an essay you have already written into a letter by rewriting it as if you were going to send your thoughts in an envelope.

Sam Turner
Sam Turner had no intention of writing for publication or selling articles when he retired from teaching junior high school.  He only had a desire to write for himself.  When as a teacher he had taken writing workshops at a local community college to improve his teaching of junior high school journalism and his advising of the yearbook and newspaper, he had come away feeling that he had received important information.  So, in his retirement, when a writing teacher told him to go to Las Vegas to a Reader’s Digest Workshop, he went.   At the workshop, he listened to editors say, “We really want writers. But people don’t follow instructions when sending manuscripts in. We need names and addresses.”

“I can do that,” Sam thought. “It’s what I always told my kids to do.”  Soon he was going to conferences in the city where he lives. At one of them, he took three pages to an editor and paid his ten dollars for her consult.  She took her red pencil and edited fast, saying,  “Well, Mr. Turner, the only reason I finished reading this is because you paid me!  Now let me tell you what you can do to fix this. Page three should be page one.”  Sam changed what he had written and continued writing his memoirs in his writing class.

He also became a member of the Society of Southwest Authors even though he hadn’t yet published.  As a teacher, he had always joined professional organizations, so he found it natural. He went to the organization’s yearly Wrangling with Writing conference and had a conference with the editor of Arizona Highways, who asked for one of Sam’s stories.

“The next year I returned to the conference,” Sam says, “and so did the Arizona Highways editor. When I showed him my work again, he remembered reading it.  But he didn’t remember why he hadn’t published it yet. He said, ‘If you don’t hear from me within three weeks, call me.’”  Although Sam called, another year went by with no response from the magazine.  People told him to pull his piece because the magazine was too slow responding, but suddenly someone from the magazine did call and sent proofs. The writing was scheduled to appear 12 months later.

“Meanwhile,” Sam recounted, “I was told about a new journal in Scottsdale, AZ called Aviation and Business Journal.  I called Arizona Highways to see if I could reprint a piece about seeing P38s flying over the Grand Canyon as a 10 year-old-boy during WWII.  The answer was yes.  Aviation and Business Journal paid me to reprint the article.  Almost at the same time, a letter from a reader of Arizona Highways reached me.  Wally Simerly said, ‘Your story is accurate.  I know because I was one of the pilots.’  I called him right away.  He was crying on the phone saying his flight instructor told him not to tell anybody because flying over Grand Canyon was restricted. They had buzzed the village at 500 feet.  I called the editor at the Journal and asked if she would be interested in an interview with one of the pilots.  She said yes and I drove to Pason, AZ to meet with Wally.  I sent in a 2000-word piece with photos of Simerly as a reconnaissance flier.”

Sam has since covered air shows and written astronomy articles and pieces about high school Air Force Junior ROTC programs as well as travel articles.  When visiting Catalina Island in California, he sold an article on the island’s “Airport in the Sky,” which is often fog-bound 20-30 days in a row.  Traveling in Oregon, he wrote about the Tillamook Naval Air Museum and got an assignment for a 2500 word article.  Sam attributes his success to taking workshops and remaining tenacious about showing editors his work.

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Following the thinking and stories of other authors can affirm your own approaches to publishing and spur new ideas about how to encourage “one thing to lead to another” in getting your work published. Let the experience of the authors you read about this week and last week percolate, and you will garner energy for designing a satisfying way to include publishing in your writing life.