How to Get Published in Magazines: Spring Office Hours Part 1

Hello, dear readers,

It’s spring — the snow is finally melting, even here in Vermont — and I just had a conversation with a friend and literary critic about the class in college about a single American novelist that changed her life.

Which got me thinking: how many of us had an encounter — a single encounter, or close to it — that set us on the path we’re on? One book, one poem, one teacher, one afternoon? It sounds hokey to say it, but I suspect many of us had one.

I did. I was 17 when I read, for a senior year English seminar, Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” and I thought: this is what a poem can be? It can think on the page like an essay and then burst into precision like that, so lyrically? I remember feeling changed by it in the way you are when something rearranges your sense of what’s possible. It was the moment I began to want to write poetry.

Did you have such a moment? How old were you, and with whom? (It sounds like I’m asking about losing one’s virginity; I suppose it was an initiation of sorts.)

I’ve been thinking about that kind of initiation lately because my inbox has been full, of questions about demystifying hte publishing process — how to see past a door it can feel like you don’t know how to open, or to enter a world whose rules seem shrouded in semi-mystery (or are all too obvious, and yet you haven’t broken in yet). Every time I give a talk, people ask me the same (important) questions: How do I pitch an essay? What does a cover letter need to do? When is my work actually ready to send out? These are the questions I hear every year when I give lectures in writing programs, and they deserve some attempt to answer them, even if it is hard to say too much in generalities. Still, there is plenty to say. So: consider this my spring office hours.

What follows is the substance of advice I’ve given in programs at Yale, in workshops in Paris, and in my inbox over decades of editing, first at The Yale Review and before that at The New Yorker and The Paris Review distilled here as honestly as I can manage. Paid subscribers, read on—and post questions for Part 2, coming next week, in the comments! If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to get more of the specific guidance I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out.