The Lighthouse Writers Top-Secret Blog
All the latest news, ideas, and opinions from Denver's Independent Literary Center: lighthousewriters.org
Lit Fest Pitch Sessions Offer Rare Face-to-Face Opportunities
The Lit Fest Business Weekend offers something rare – a chance to meet face-to-face with agents and editors. Most meetings are reserved for Lit Fest pass holders, but now we’ve opened up the pitch sessions, and your face can be in front of an editor’s face. Imagine your lovely face smiling when he or she tells you how brilliant you are. Think of the invaluable feedback you’ll receive. You might hear that just right thing, which will change the direction of your article or essay and land it in print!
And if showing your pretty face isn’t incentive enough…
Registrants who sign up for a pitch session with one of our three featured editors may also attend the panel session “Breaking into the Freelance Market” with Jason Heller, Geoff Van Dyke, and Cara McDonald on Saturday, June 16, 2012 from 10:00 to 11:30 AM. For more information or to sign up follow this link.
Meet Today’s Featured Editor – Cara McDonald of Breckenridge and Fort Collins magazines.
Cara McDonald, MA, is a writer and editor with a background in creative nonfiction, and the co-founder and editor of Breckenridge Magazine and Fort Collins Magazine. In addition, she creates custom publications for clients such as Winter Park Resort. She spent the last 10 years as a regional magazine editor at titles including Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, and 5280, the Denver Magazine. Her focus is literary non-fiction and stories that express a sense of place, as well as regional culture and lifestyle pieces.
Cara has a very limited number of meetings available. Interested? Contact Marie at marie@lighthousewriters.org to find out more about Cara’s consultation schedule.
A Small Offering of Cara’s Wisdom and Expertise
I asked Cara to share a few words of advice, and here’s what she had to say. (Pretty much she wrote this whole blog, and I just had to hit send. Thanks, Cara!)
I’m a regional magazine editor because I think it’s one of the most meaningful magazine formats out there. I’ve worked at (or on) six regionals in the last 14 years, editing and writing stories on everything from state politics to the secret lives of race car drivers to what Martha Stewart really thinks about the tastes of Midwesterners. I also spent two years as a working freelancer. I’ve written for pubs like Men’s Journal, Natural Health, High Country News, and freelanced for non-profits, resorts, and web design studios.
You have to be versatile to create something that’s not just intensive reporting or an info-dump, but that’s also literate, with brains and beauty. In my tenure at magazines such as 5280 and now with the two fledgling mags I’ve launched, I wanted to throw the doors wide open—on subject matter, and also to writers. Journalism is a highly specialized and important trade, but there is also writing as craft, and I love different voices, new voices, and literary voices.
So there’s a lot of opportunity for serious, accomplished writers to cross over into paid magazine writing, and in turn to parlay magazine writing skills into freelance writing for other specialized outlets. Freelancing for magazines is very competitive, but finding writers who have “magazine brain” isn’t easy. I find myself turning to again and again to writers who (and this is the tips part, for those of you skimming):
- Come bearing gifts. They show up with strange, focused, wonderful ideas that reveal a deeper meaning about how we live.
- Get out of their own way. They don’t grovel or wring their hands, or overwrite, or freak out, or blow deadlines so they can polish The Precious over and over.
- Treat it like a job. Complete with tracking paperwork, meeting deadlines, returning e-mails.
- Are all about what’s in it for me. Me the editor, I mean. Fostering a brilliant and mutually appreciative relationship with an editor where you can explore great thoughts and ambitious projects is certainly the ideal, but on a boring, soul-killing level, the editor is a contractor, and you’re the sub-contractor, and the contractor is going to order up a job and you’ve got to give it to her without going off on a tangent, or riffing on something you’ve been dying to explore, or getting all James Joyce about it.
