Writing about writing, Part II of II

After I graduated in 1985, I entered the time-honored profession of being a restaurant server, at which I did very poorly. Back in Ye Olden Days when people still used traveler’s checks, one fine day I managed somehow in the short distance between a table and the kitchen to lose a $100 traveler’s check.

After having a) panicked and b) dug through the trash for several minutes, I decided that my dignity was worth more than $100 and I stopped and I had to replace that $100 out of my own pocket. Bear in mind that in today’s dollars, that was a little over three hundred bucks. I cried in the restaurant kitchen while the dishwasher patted my shoulder awkwardly.

Anyway: I am not here to recommend this experience! But that $100 was a superb tipping point, because it led me to realize no one was gonna pull my butt out of working as a server and I had to look for another job pronto.

My first real job writing was working for In Pittsburgh Newsweekly, where I did an awesomely bad job of selling ads and where I got to write a few articles.

After that, I went into fundraising and development for a few years, and then life started to happen to me.

I still read all the time and wrote less than I wanted to, but I had STUFF GOING ON. I sat down one day and wrote a fan letter to Laurie Colwin, a novelist who also wrote a column for many years for Gourmet magazine. I had never written a fan letter to a writer before and didn’t have much to say other than the fact that I loved her work and read her column each month and thought she was the cat’s meow.

Lo and behold, Laurie Colwin wrote back to me. It was several pages long, handwritten in dark blue ink on powder blue paper, and it altered the path I was to take. Before receiving her letter, I’d not thought too much about what I was doing with my writing. I was dilly-dallying along, writing in fits and spurts, getting frustrated with rejection letters, not taking it or myself at all seriously.

I had actually been getting to the point of offering to write for free somewhere, anywhere, just to get some exposure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that on a limited basis, but it’s dangerous, too — as a friend of mine once pointed out, “You can die of exposure.”

Laurie Colwin’s response to me changed everything. She was warm and gracious and encouraging. I was reading it for the 900^th time over breakfast one morning when I had a “eureka!” moment and thought, I could do this. I could write about cooking and food!

Writing doesn’t only mean poetry. It doesn’t necessarily have to be short fiction about angst and love and fateful encounters and drinking too much. It doesn’t confine itself only to Pride and Prejudice or “The Wasteland” or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sometimes it can just be about cooking — heck, that’s what Laurie Colwin was doing, and she was doing it beautifully, in a nationally respected magazine!

On the strength of Laurie Colwin’s letter, I blithely and rather suddenly decided to start self-publishing my own culinary newsletter. It seemed like a good way to combine cooking, which I loved, and writing, which I couldn’t live without. It was something I could do at home on my computer. I named my newsletter Convivium — Latin for “feast” or “banquet.” I thought I’d charge $18 a year for a six-issue subscription. In my innocence, I thought, “Heck, all I need to do is get somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 subscribers and I’ll be all set!”

It was like the old Steve Martin routine: “How to be a millionaire! First: get a million dollars!”

Laurie Colwin died just a few months after sending me that letter. In my head, she’s somewhere smiling at me because her single letter led me to a writing pursuit which occupied me happily and long-term. I wrote, designed and self-published my newsletter for seven years. While it got rave reviews in The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post (which named it one of the ten best culinary newsletters in the country, out of hundreds), I never did hit the magical 1,000 – 2,000 subscriber goal. I hovered for many years right around 300, but I got a big charge out of the fact that those 300 people were in 28 states and three foreign countries. The people who loved me, adored me, but there simply weren’t enough of them.

But the subscriber issue didn’t matter too much, because something magical had started to happen. As soon as I decided to devote my time to writing what I wanted to write about — and what I knew — I started getting all kinds of work. Here I was, writing essays about being home and cooking and rearing our kids (two at this point) and sending out Convivium to every newspaper and magazine editor I could think of and after a little while, some of these editors started calling me.

I got a call from the food editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, asking me to write for them, and over eight years, I wrote hundreds of articles for them. Her name was Suzanne Martinson and she was marvelous. When she hired me, she said, “Don’t you dare send me something about strawberries on the run-up to Christmas. It has to be seasonal. Otherwise, write what you want.” And in eight years, she rejected only two of my pieces.

I got calls and e-mails from Better Homes & Gardens and Gourmet and Southern Home and American Heritage and The Old Farmer’s Almanac and I wrote things or took photos for all of them. I was asked to chair a panel on freelance writing at a writer’s conference in Tennessee and while I was there, I was asked to write a couple of entries for The Encyclopedia of Appalachia. I branched out and began writing about other things — woodswalking, wildflowers, tie-dying T-shirts, my enduring fondness for bizarro proper names — whatever was on my mind, whatever I had been up to, I wrote about it.

It seemed as though each thing snowballed into the next thing, and each subsequent assignment was more interesting, more prestigious, and better-paying. I was no longer just doing food writing. I was getting work from all over the place and I was pitching articles like crazy. Even the rejection emails — which still arrived regularly — were less formulaic and frequently asked to see other work down the road.

The proverbial icing on the cake was about a year before I turned 40, when I was commissioned to write a book. Hall China, which was then a pottery in my hometown of East Liverpool, Ohio, commissioned me to write a history of the company in celebration of their 100^th anniversary in 2003. I come from a pottery family myself — Vodrey China was launched by one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, Jabez Vodrey, and operated under various names from 1857 to 1928 — so of course the answer was YES, PLEASE.

I give great credit to my time in the Carnegie Mellon creative writing program for having transformed an interest in writing into an appetite — and for helping to refine a dilettante into a writer. I’ve never made more than a part-time living at writing. but like I said, each thing has led to bigger things — and I’m doing what I love.

The newspaper and magazine worlds have tumbled precipitously downward in the years since I gave this talk at Carnegie Mellon, but if you want to write for any publication, some things still apply:

1) Write whatever you want, if you know a fair amount about it. And if not, that’s what research is for. If you’re doing it right, your interest in the subject will shine through.

2) Send a thank-you note when a piece gets accepted and again when it’s actually published. Not a text. No, not an email either — now cut that OUT. Write an actual on-paper note. Courtesy is rare and it’s appreciated and in this online-centric world of ours, getting an actual piece of mail is a rare treat.

3) Remember that rejections reject a piece, not you as a writer.

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My books are all available on Amazon except for the most recent one. All the Frogs: Laughing While You’re on the Dating Apps is available only via yours truly, by sending $25 and your mailing address to Venmo @VodreyBooksEtc. That covers the book, shipping, etc. Thanks for reading, feel free to share and please consider subscribing!