PicoBlog

I wrote my first magazine article while I was waiting to hear back from agents regarding my novel GIRL (about a teenage girl and her local music scene.)  I was living in Portland at this time.  I was 32 years old.

In those days, the way you got an agent was you wrote them a query letter (describing your novel) and mailed it to their office in New York.  If they were interested, they wrote you a letter back.  You then had to mail the xeroxed 400 page manuscript to them in a large padded manila envelope.  And then they wrote back, months later, telling you what they thought.  This took a lot of time.  There was a lot of waiting.  

So one night, with nothing better to do, I tried writing a magazine article.  I had no particular magazine in mind.  I wrote about being “apolitical”, probably as a result of some political controversy going on at the time.  I gave the article the tone of something you might read in The New York Times Magazine.  “I’m a member of the new generation and this is how I feel about . . . [whatever].”

The article was pretty good.  Possibly I could sell it. But who to send it to?  I rode my bike down to Powell's Books and studied their magazine section.  Esquire seemed too old for it.  GQ didn’t publish guest columns.  The New York Times was not a realistic possibility.  I looked at other magazines.  Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Utne Reader, Mother Jones, none of these seemed right.  Then I saw Details which was a young men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine.

I looked through Details.  They had five or six column type articles in their front section.  These addressed typical men’s magazine subjects:  dating, relationships, work situations. The writing was straightforward.  It seemed possible that my “Confessions of an Apolitical Person” could fit in there.  

They didn’t have any kind of submission policy.  So I wrote down the name of the Editor in Chief and the magazine’s New York City address. 

I went home and tweaked my article a little more, making sure it was the right length and had the right kind of earnest, reflective conclusion that mid-level magazines required.

Then I printed it out and slipped the 6 page article into a 8 x 11 inch manila envelope and mailed it to New York.

Much to my surprise I got a response two weeks later.  It was a letter from the Editor in Chief saying they liked my article.  I was instructed to call a certain editor on the phone.  He would work with me on it. 

I was like: “Well, that was easy.” 

I called the editor.  He suggested some light edits and mailed me a contract.  $1200 was the payment.  (My rent at the time, in a group house in Portland, was $150 a month).  There was no definite publication date.  It would probably run five or six months in the future.

The considerable amount of $1200 (eight months rent) inspired me to start work on another Details article.  I began perusing other magazines for ideas.  Cosmopolitan was famous for their funny articles.  “How to Seduce Your Brother’s Best Friend.” “5 Tips for Mind-Blowing Orgasms.”   “Your Assistant:  Is She Trying to Steal Your Job?”

These articles were intentionally outrageous.  Everyone got the joke.  The secret was to make it so dumb and silly as to be irresistible (“clickbait” in today’s lingo).  

So I tried writing some.  The trick was thinking of a topic that would grab people’s attention. This is how I came up with “How To Date A Feminist”. 

I started with the title. Then I created a scenario:   a typical hapless college guy falls in love with a cute co-ed … who turns out to be a women’s studies major!  

The article then gave advice on how to proceed and what to expect.  The tone was lightly humorous.  But it also made some obvious points.  It really was a a guide to how to date a feminist. At the same time, it made fun of the whole situation. I was careful to include hipster references of the time:  Sonic Youth, Doc Martins, thrift-store culture, freshmen girls in mini-skirts with GIRLS RULE buttons on their backpacks.

When it was done, I stopped and took a moment to reflect.  I felt like the piece was great.  It was funny.  It was fair. It was accurate. Details would probably love it.  But would it hurt me down the road? 

I remembered my fancy liberal arts college.  All the women there considered themselves feminists.  Most were reasonable about it.  But there were always a few who had zero sense of humor and could be offended by anything.

I had noticed there were people like that in book publishing.  Bret Easton Ellis had experienced this in 1991 when a group of women at his publishing house managed to get his novel American Psycho cancelled. (It was later picked up by a different publisher.)

Nowadays, people celebrate American Psycho but at the time this was a huge controversy. Women’s groups were fuming. If “How To Date a Feminist” came out in a national magazine, I might get attacked in the same way. It could do serious damage to my future career prospects.

But that was the thing.  I didn’t have any career prospects.  I’d been querying agents for a year.  No one was interested in my novel.  And I’d already written a couple novels before that.  This new one, GIRL, was by far the best I had done.  If I couldn’t sell it, I probably had no chance as a writer. 

I needed to get people’s attention.  That was a big part of my problem.  None of these agents had heard of me.  I hadn’t published anything.  I didn’t know anyone.  I was just some guy from Oregon.  I had to take a risk.  I had to do something to get myself noticed.

So, despite my misgivings, I put the finished article in a 8 x 11 manilla envelope and mailed it to New York …. 

Details wrote me right back.  They wanted it.  This time the contract was included. Payment was now $1500 (ten months rent).  They were going to push back my “Apolitical” article and run “How To Date” immediately (two months from then.) 

So that was exciting.  Another article in a national magazine! And the fact that they were so eager to print it assuaged my fears it would get me in trouble.

So now I started thinking about writing something longer, a feature story.  For years, I had been hearing about the Green Tortoise Bus that traveled back and forth across the country.  It was a party bus.  It stopped at hot springs and camped in the desert.  The passengers were all young people.  It seemed like a good feature possibility.  (I was now studying back issues of Details at the library to see what they liked).

I was also thinking that I needed to return to New York.  Like to live.  If I was ever going to sell GIRL, I needed to be there in person.  I needed to run around and network and harass people and do the New York hustle.   

So I called my editor and pitched the Green Tortoise idea.  He liked it.  He wrote up a contract.  $4000 I would be paid.  Plus expenses.  I literally fell down on the floor when I hung up the phone.  FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS! It was like I’d got a MacArthur Genius grant. And free beer for the entire two week trip!

I had not informed my editor that when I got off the Green Tortoise bus at NY Port Authority, I planned to stay in New York.  When I did tell him this—sitting in his office with my sleeping bag rolled up beside me—he asked me what I planned to do in New York.  I said: “Write for you.”  He seemed a little worried by that.  But he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “we’ll see.”

I lucked out and found a tiny apartment at 51 West Eleventh Street. $360 a month. The apartment was about 20’ x 8’.  It had probably been a walk-in closet originally.  It had a window, a tiny sink, a hot-plate stove and a mini-fridge.  The bathroom was in the hall. 

All I had with me was a sleeping bag and some clothes.  I needed a desk, I found one on the street.  I needed a chair, I found one on a different street.  I needed a Brother Word Processor 2000, I found one at Goodwill.

In the meantime, I was running out of agents to query.  I had to do something with GIRL.  So I sent an excerpt to Sassy magazine, thinking if nothing else, I might make a little money.

Sassy was for teen girls.  It was like Details’ little sister.  Actually it was way cooler than Details.  And by 1993 it had become a red-hot cultural phenomenon. 

What made Sassy so interesting was that it melded a bratty, irreverent teenager-vibe with a new and emerging “girl-power feminism.” (Similar to what I wrote about in my article). This new version of feminism had jettisoned all the boring parts of the 70s and 80s movement, and amped up all the fun parts. Sassy embodied this shift with their smart, snarky tone. It was literally the perfect magazine for a pivotal moment in the culture.

The rise of Sassy was great news for me.  The narrator of my novel—a teenager in Portland whose friend forms a band—was exactly their demographic.  I sent in one short excerpt, and then another, and then a third.  Sure enough, they bought them all.  $1000 each.  More free money! 

Then one day the head of publicity for Details called.  She told me the latest issue was out, with “How To Date A Feminist” in it.  She was getting requests from morning drive-time radio programs for me to come on the air and talk about the article.  Could I do that?  Sure, I said.

At that time, every city in America had some sort of Morning Zoo radio show full of cornball sound effects and a crew of lunatic disk jockeys imitating Howard Stern.  So that’s what I was dealing with there.  On the first show, at 6am, I had so much trouble keeping up with their high-jinks, they just hung up on me.  On the later ones, I did better.

At the same time we started getting reprint offers.  Magazines in Europe wanted to reprint “How To Date A Feminist”, some of them were women’s magazines.  Different newspapers in the U.S. as well.  I signed all the contracts.  And got paid again!  

Meanwhile, I waited to see how my Sassy editors would react to “How to Date a Feminist”.  I had made sure to make friends with them.  I used every excuse to visit their mid-town offices, I was always “swinging by to pick up my check,” never letting them mail it.

This was the real test for my article.  The Sassy editors—who also wrote most of the magazine—were the most culturally intelligent people I knew.  If they liked my article then I’d consider myself in the clear.  I didn’t care what anybody else thought. 

It turned out they liked it.  They weren’t offended.  They thought it was funny.  This was a great relief. (I did get a strongly worded letter from the National Organization of Women (NOW) objecting to my use of “stereotypes”.)

Thanks to “How To Date” I was now a star at Details. The Editor in Chief and I would chit chat in the elevator.  For the next six months I cranked out a bunch more articles. 

At the same time, the music scene that I had written about in GIRL, was becoming a national phenomenon.  “Grunge” had arrived in New York.  It was in Spin.  It was on MTV.  The New York Times wrote (lame) culture articles about it.  Fashion people in Manhattan wore flannel shirts, tied around their waist and logging boots.  The second Nirvana record came out and became the soundtrack of the summer. And then in September they played Saturday Night Live.  It was like my little corner of the world—this tiny little scene—had suddenly risen up and taken over the world. 

*

Then one day, at Details, I was talking to my editor and I mentioned the novel I’d been trying to sell, which I couldn’t get an agent for.

My editor knew an agent.  A good one.  He got out his Rolodex and gave me the number.  And that guy became my agent.

It took a while but my agent found a receptive editor at Simon and Schuster.  She liked GIRL, but she had one problem.  She wanted to know who the audience was.  Who was going to buy an adult book about a teenage girl and a bunch of local bands in Portland, Oregon?

Around that same time, the editors at Sassy called and said they were getting letters from their readers asking about the excerpts from GIRL.  These readers wanted to know where the book was. Why wasn’t it in the book store?  The Sassy editors asked if I wanted the letters.  There was a stack of them.

So I went up to midtown and picked up the letters at the Sassy office.  Then I walked the couple blocks over to Simon and Schuster and gave the stack of letters to the hesitant editor.  There they were.  Actual letters from the people who would buy my book. 

A couple days later, I had a contract for GIRL.  With a $35,000 advance.  Though by that time, I had figured out that these large sums of money, that seemed so extravagant to me, were not at all unusual in New York City.  This was what everyone got paid. And the good writers got more.

Meanwhile, Grunge got bigger.  Pearl Jam began to eclipse Nirvana as the mainstream mega-seller of this new musical genre.  MTV was riding the wave.  More bands appeared: Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots.

New York hipsters were of course resistant to any cultural phenomenon they hadn’t created themselves, but even they were steamrolled.  They couldn’t claim to be any cooler than a bunch of unwashed Northwest weirdos who had stormed the jaded music business and made everything new again.

As for me, I was quietly sitting in cafes, going over the final copy-edits of GIRL. Except for punctuation issues, Simon and Schuster had barely touched the manuscript. The one thing my editor insisted on was that I divide the novel into parts.  So I did.  Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  

When I wasn’t working, I was wandering the East Village, going to see bands, going on long late-night walks around lower Manhattan.  Occasionally I hung out with the Sassy editors, who I adored.  I was literally living my dream life. 

*

And then one morning in April, as I woke up in my sleeping bag, I heard the guy on the radio say that a body had been found on the property of Kurt Cobain’s house in Seattle.  Not long after, it was announced that he was dead. 

I called the Sassy offices.  My main editor there answered the phone.  Most of our interactions had been superficial, joking around or doing edits on the stories.  We’d never really talked about anything serious.   

But she was the one I wanted to talk to.  Or just be on the phone with.  She understood better than anyone, the significance of that moment.  Not that there was anything to say. We repeated the facts that were known so far.  And expressed our shock and sympathy for the various people involved.  (I’d known Courtney since she was a teenager, in Portland). 

But the Sassy phones were blowing up.  She had to go.  I hung up and sat there in my tiny room.  I felt the aura of all these radiant people, this singular moment in history, suddenly torn away from me.  From everybody.  A grim cloud of pain and regret would descend in its place. 

That seemed to be the end of my adventure in New York.  I had sold my book.  I could write for Details from anywhere.  I didn’t need to live in a closet anymore.  Something told me to leave now, before my luck ran out. 

I gave notice on the apartment and a month later I put my desk and my chair back on the street where I found them.  I balanced my Brother Word Processor 2000 on top of a trash can, in case someone else wanted it.  Then I rode the subway to the airport and flew back to Portland.

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