15 Magazines Looking for Personal Essay Submissions (ft. Brittany Ackerman)
Enjoy these open magazines with an essay on crafting narratives and finding catharsis through writing (Sub Club List #17)
Our guest writer this week is Brittany Ackerman, author of the essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine and the novel, The Brittanys. Below, find her essay on her early attempts at writing personal essays and the interaction between personal experiences, crafting narratives, and finding catharsis through writing.
“A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confessions. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.” – Philip Lopate
One of the first workshops I took in graduate school was creative nonfiction. On the syllabus, we were given a number of books to purchase, including To Show and To Tell by Philip Lopate. The craft book, quoted to be a “nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction,” came in addition to the other memoirs and collections of essays we’d be reading for the semester. I’d never read a craft book before. I’d never even heard of Philip Lopate.
The personal essay I wrote for my grad school application was, in retrospect, horrible. It was a memory of my first time meeting Cinderella at Disney World with unbearably long descriptions of the elaborate costume I wore: my hair tightly pulled into a bun and the painful bobby pins keeping it in place, my powder blue dress that matched Cinderella’s, the plastic “glass” heels, the silver tiara to top it all off.
I wrote about standing in line, about how all the little girls looked the same as me, all of us ready to meet Cinderella. I recounted that once I finally ascended the castle steps to meet Cinderella, I lost the nerve to tell her my name. Luckily, the pen I’d handed her to sign my autograph book had my name on it, and when she spoke to me, I felt special. I felt real. The essay is about believing, the effect of Disney’s magic.
But at six years old, I felt a surge of consciousness I’d never felt before. I became aware of my own existence in the world right at that very moment, standing there in the hot Orlando sun dressed as Cinderella. Up until that moment, I thought I was a Disney Princess just because I was dressed like one, just because I’d seen all the movies and memorized all the songs. But princesses aren’t real, or at least not in the Disney sense.
I was so green as a writer then and didn’t have the nerve to admit this on the page. I thought that a personal essay was supposed to be purely uplifting and happy (lol) and that I needed to exude some sentiment of joy in order for the essay to be successful. If I were to re-write this essay now, it would be completely different. It would be the honest story of how scared I was leaving the park that day, of how I realized we couldn’t all be princesses because we weren’t all special. We were all just girls sweating and uncomfortable in our clothes. Cinderella was a college kid getting paid hourly to pose with us. She probably smoked weed and had an awful boyfriend. And there we were, looking up as if she was truly magical.
Somehow, I got into graduate school with that essay. I think the program director must have seen potential in my work, the potential for me to dig deeper into my memories in order to excavate the truth.
In that first graduate class, we read Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, among others. We read books that resonated with me, as I had joined the program so I could embark on writing essays about my childhood. And this time, not the Disney version.
I was fresh out of a terrible relationship when I entered grad school, but by the end of the first week of orientation, I already had my eye on someone. He was in my creative nonfiction workshop, where I’d join him outside during breaks while he smoked, and I listened to him talk about whatever had just transpired in class. I was more interested in what he had to say than my own thoughts and opinions at the time. I was ready to write about the inner workings of my psyche, but not yet able to practice this in real life. He was the type of person who enjoyed an audience. As time went on and the hours we accumulated together in the workshop grew, I was certain he was going to ask me out. Instead, he asked to borrow a book.
“You think I could borrow the Lopate?” He asked, and I knew I would give him the book, that I’d not only lend it to him but that I’d let him keep it indefinitely. Something cosmic made me understand that I’d already given myself over to him, so what more was a stupid book? It turned out that me bringing the book over to his apartment was his way of getting us alone. We dated for the rest of our time together in the program. Once we graduated, it only took six months for us to break up.
Even though the Philip Lopate book was required, we never got to it for some reason. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t read it. It didn’t matter that my grad school boyfriend had. I still, to this day, haven’t read the book, or any of Philip Lopate’s many books. I hadn’t thought about that book for years until I was Googling quotes about personal essays for this post, and Lopate came up. But again, something cosmic, something connecting me to the name of the book, to the memory, to the feeling, to the urge to write it all down and figure it out.
I remember packing all my things and leaving the apartment, his apartment that I’d moved into and never truly felt like ours. I remember separating my books from his shelves. I remember finding To Show and To Tell and holding it, deciding to leave it on his desk as a final “Fuck You.”
This sounds like a triumphant moment, but at the time, I was so depressed and lost. I had no idea what my next move would be. The Lopate became a symbol for how willing I was to give myself away. It’s only now, so many years later, happily married and watching my five-month-old continue to grow, that I can see the break up as something to re-imagine, something that could make its way into my writing.
Back to that first semester– I accomplished what I’d set out to do, and more. I wrote an essay about being Jewish, I wrote an essay about the Disney ride Space Mountain, I wrote about my brother, about myself. I wrote a lot of pieces about myself. I got feedback from my peers and started compiling the essays as I edited each one. I left grad school with a book that was ready to be submitted, sent off to contests and agents and publishers. The book was published three years later.
Personal essay holds a special place in my heart. For me, it’s a place to re-write my life after it’s been lived. It’s a place to imagine what lies ahead in the future. It holds space in the present to examine myself, like therapy, like zooming into a photograph and staring at the parts that give me trouble.
In my confusion and in my darkness, I open up a blank page.
Weekly Special: 15 Magazines Open for Personal Essay Submissions
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