How I Broke Into The New Yorker (Digital): Lorraine Boissoneault
You don't need an agent! It's all lies!
Readers know about my my Q&A series “How I Got My Agent”, where I interview writers about, well, how they got their agent. That is still ongoing! However, there are so many stories to tell about publishing your work that I’m expanding my interviews to include other journeys that are just as worthwhile to read about. I’m calling it “How I Did X” for now.
This month, I chatted with the talented and super smart Lorraine Boissoneault about publishing in The New Yorker for the first time.
I am able to take the time to set up and conduct these interviews thanks to the support of my subscribers. If you enjoy them, please consider upgrading your subscription. These interviews will always be free for readers, but subscriptions help me cover the cost of transcription services and the care I take in preparing them.
Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes scripts and produces videos for the popular educational channels Real Science and Real Engineering. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award.
Last year, she published the essay “Learning to Live with a Broken Heartbeat” for the digital arm of The New Yorker. It was her first byline in the publication. By the way, I only add the “digital” because I think the magazine might have rules about it, but to me it’s just a big of a deal.
What can we learn from Lorraine? A few notes:
Keep tabs on your network. That editor at a small publication or the writer friend who just published a chapbook—you have no idea where they may land and the doors they may open for you. (And always remember to open doors for others too!)
With IP being so important right now, don’t gloss over that part of the contract. Advocate for yourself.
Don’t do the hard work of rejecting yourself. That’s part of an editor’s job. Swing big. You never know who will say yes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There are a lot of myths about how people get published in The New Yorker, even the online version, including: you have to know someone, it can only be done through an agent, or be like Anthony Bourdain, whose piece was picked up from the slush pile because his mom used to work there and nudged someone to take a look. How did you get published in The New Yorker?
I knew someone (laughs). That is the short answer, however. There was an editor I worked with at Atlas Obscura when he was there. I had cold pitched him a story and written a couple stories for him while he was an editor. He ended up moving to The New Yorker and becoming an editor for the digital side. I had been working on the personal essay that turned into The New Yorker piece on my own, to see if I could write it. I had the idea but didn’t know if I could actually write it emotionally and intellectually. I wanted to see how it felt.
I had written a couple drafts of it and shared it with a few other writer friends who really encouraged me to try and get it published somewhere. I knew that The New Yorker does personal history occasionally. Since I had worked with this editor, I was like, “Hey, I have this personal essay, I don't know if you'd be interested. I'm totally open to edits. Would you like to take a look?” He did and was like, “Yes, I want to do some edits, but I'm interested. We'll take it.” It was that straightforward and pretty easy.
About four, five years ago, I had cold pitched an editor about a different story. It was more of a reported story, and I had not written a draft of it at all, just been doing some reporting and felt like it would be a good piece for The New Yorker. The editor was interested but wanted me to write it all on spec. I did more research and considered doing that, but the story was just not in a place yet. All the things that were happening in it weren't ready for it to be written about yet. This hasn't been published anywhere yet, and I hope eventually I can publish it somewhere. But I think it is possible to cold pitch an editor at the New Yorker and get them to say yes.
What my editor for the personal essay told me is that new writers usually start online. You work your way into the print. I've heard the myths too. Clearly knowing someone helped me, but you can pitch their editors like anywhere else. Doesn't mean you'll get a yes but…
Let’s back up a bit because it is someone you know, but in a professional capacity. It wasn't like your best friend from college. What is the essay is and why did you feel so strongly that it could be published in a place like that.
The essay is about my experience having a couple different kinds of heart arrhythmias and conceptualizing that in a metaphor about the weather that your body experiences. So pairing my heart problems with scary instances I've had with bad weather. I felt strongly that I could get it published somewhere. I had published an essay in Catapult, RIP, about my experience with thyroid disease maybe a year earlier. That was one of the first times that I'd really written about my experiences with chronic illness, and I was very nervous. I have not historically done a ton of personal essay writing. I think of myself as a science and history journalist. I write, I report and write about other stuff, not about myself, but I was interested in trying to experiment with personal essay a little more.
That catapult piece was like first dipping my toe in. It felt pretty good. I enjoyed the process; I enjoyed the editor. I decided to try this more on my own and see what I came up with. When I had a draft, there were a few places I thought about sending it to. You can submit essays to literary magazines like The Rumpus or Electric Literature. I even thought about doing it for Catapult again, but Catapult had at that point a certain word limit that I was above. When I started thinking about more, I realized The New Yorker publishes stuff like this occasionally. I didn’t know if it was going to be a good fit, but if I'm going to try and pitch it around, I might as well go straight to the top and get rejected and then work my way down from there. But they took it.
I love that idea because I think many of us begin thinking, “let me just start small”. That has its own benefits, but there's also the flip side of that. You're going to get rejected so many times, you might as well go big. You never know who's going to say yes.
Because what I was writing about was so personal, I'm happy that I had the experience at Catapult first. It still got a lot of traction. I got a lot of reader responses, and I had a supportive editor there. The experience was good. That told me I was ready, personally, to write about something like this for a big audience and The New Yorker is one of the biggest audiences. That's a big step, but I think I'm ready for it emotionally.
Did you work hard on the pitch, or did you send a draft?
I had already written a draft of the essay. I think it was 3000 words and I had revised it a couple times. The pitch was just, “Hey, I have an essay, could you read it?” I would've done that differently if it was a cold pitch but because this was an editor, I knew I could say, “Hey, we worked together.” He remembered who I was from having worked with me previously and I told him it was different than anything that I had written for him in the past, but I thought it might be a good fit.
How long did it take for the editor to get back?
He sent me a message right away saying that he got it, and he would let me know. Within a week, he told me he had to go and get approval from another editor too, because he was new there. he got another editor on board, and it was probably la week, in total, for them to say yes and send the contract over.
How was the editing process?
It was intense. I expected it to be. It was overall a good process, and it was a lot of figuring out the best way to tell the story in that format. The earlier draft was more philosophical. I was thinking, how do we as humans deal with the unpredictability of the world and our lives? A lot of that got trimmed for the sake of space because there was a lot of action in the story. We needed to make more room for the reader to be brought into the scenes when they happened. I went through multiple rounds of edits with the main editor that I worked with, then another round of edits with a second editor, and then fact checking with a fact checker. It was process, but a good one.
What was working with a fact checker like? I don't know if that many people know how that process even works.
I've been fact checked a handful of times at different publications. It's unfortunately rare because it's pretty resource intensive if you're really fact checking something. Usually, I will annotate my drafts right at the beginning for myself, if nothing else to say this is where this information is from. It was a little different with a personal essay. Some were things I could point to verify. I mentioned Hurricane Sandy at one point and how many people died in New York City. I had that information linked in a footnote.
For things that were my personal experiences, the fact checker called my brother and my husband and looked at my medical records. I decided that was okay for this purpose. I'm talking about my medical experiences. I gave her the numbers of different hospitals and doctors I had seen. I don't know if she reached out to them or not. Would they remember me? Would they even be able to talk about it for HIPPA? I don't know. But that also was very intense.
How long did the editing process take?
That was the longest process. Two or three months. Daniel, the editor, had other stuff he was editing too. I was working on other stuff at the same time too. Then there was another couple of weeks before it came out, when it was finalized. It was on the longer side.
With regards to the contract, was there anything that stood out to you about it.
I have never seen a contract like that before. Holy crap. Yeah. It was a pretty good contract because the rights revert to the writer after a certain period, which is often not the case. But then because there is so much IP optioning, there were all these details about what percentage I would get and what percentage the magazine gets. I always try to read contracts as thoroughly as I can to understand what I'm getting myself into. I made sure to let them know I was thinking about some of these same ideas for a book. We discussed it so that it would work out.
When it came out, how did it feel? What response did you get?
It was exciting and scary at the same time. Every time I've published anything personal, it's been that combination of horror and anticipation: “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, why did I do that? I don’t know if I wanted people to know all this information about me.” Ultimately, what I'm trying to get across is important enough that putting myself out there can be part of it. I interview people all the time and sometimes people are willing to share very intimate, vulnerable things. If I have a story to tell that I think is important, I should be willing to share those intimate, vulnerable things too within the boundaries that are comfortable to me.
There was a very good response from readers. I got a ton of emails and messages from other people who had experienced similar things or the same thing. That was the most gratifying part of it because that was why I wanted it to be out there. I just felt so alone when the experience was happening to me. I didn't know anyone else that had experienced the same thing. There's only so much you get from doctors. I just didn't understand a lot of what was happening. The response from The New Yorker was nice too. They promoted it and shouted it out in the print magazine.
Now that you've hit that benchmark, are you aiming for The New Yorker print?
I would love that, and I do have plans to pitch them more stories. I would like to keep working with Daniel. I like him a lot as an editor and I have multiple other pitches stocked up to send, but I started a new job in October. I've been feeling out my schedule. I didn't want to overextend myself before I knew what the workflow would be like. Short answer, yes. We'll see when it happens.
With regards to your essay, have you started working on that potential book? Are you still figuring it out yet? Do you want to tell us more about that?
I'm working on the proposal at this point. I have one nonfiction book that was published seven years ago. I wrote another proposal that went out around the start of the pandemic and involved a lot of travel to China and Europe. I had some good responses from editors, but everyone was like this book is not getting written. It was disappointing. I'm now working on this one, which is a little different because it has a more memoir aspect to it and you have to write a lot more sample material. My agent doesn't think I need to write the entire book thankfully, the sample is longer than the other samples I've written for proposals for nonfiction books in the past. It's taking a little while, but I think it's going well.
Do you have any tips for people hoping to pitch The New Yorker digital?
Twitter used to be a great resource for seeing calls for pitches. I saw New Yorker editors, especially newer ones post calls for pitches occasionally. Resources like Study Hall are good for freelancers because if you sign up at a certain tier, you have access to their database of editor emails, I'm pretty sure that's where I got the first editor email that I pitched years ago. Freelancing is hard sometimes, really frustrating, and pitching people and getting rejected sucks. But you have to keep pitching people and, at some point, someone will say yes. Just because someone says no doesn't mean it's not good. It just means they're not the right person or the right publication for it.
And we’re circling back to what you said at the beginning, right? You were able to pitch this editor who you worked with in the past, which is good to keep in mind too. The connections you make in smaller publications can also lead to bigger things down the road.
Yeah. Hopefully they all count.
This is such a long career, the marathon of it. Plus, you mentioned that you cold pitched that other editor who was happy to read something on spec. It's not necessarily only the agented Pulitzer Prize winner who gets through the door.
You can definitely get through. There are ways. But one of the things I find most annoying about this industry, and about all industries, is knowing people helps. The longer I've been writing, the easier it's been in some ways because I know more people from having worked with them in different ways, whether it was as a freelancer or when I was on staff. You have to network a lot. I don't like networking, but it is very valuable.
I think that's a good thing to say. It was a lesson that took me a long time to learn I kept making this division between meritocracy and networking. It took me 10 years to realize oh, this is just how the world works. And networking only takes you so far; you have to prove yourself. But once you do, you are going to want to have that solid network because they'll keep referring you for projects and that's a good thing, you know?
Generally speaking, everyone is trying to find ways to support one another because journalism is hard. Now I'm in a position where I can try and get people published in a, a different way in my new job, I'm going to use that as best I can. I think other people are doing the same thing.
To learn more about Lorraine, visit her website or follow her on Twitter at @boissolm. You can also check out her book, The Last Voyageurs.
Thank You For Sending Me to Tin House/Still Time to Help!
I’m still aglow with the bright light that was my Tin House experience. Absolutely worth it despite the financial pressure it put me through! The total cost of room and board is $2,200 plus the cost of a ticket from NYC-Portland, which ended up being $817.70. Tickets to Italy are cheaper, lmao. Thought the tuition has been paid in full, being there did entail extras, like Lyft rides to the airport and a portable fan for the un-air conditioned rooms at Reed College. So if you think your chance to help send me to Tin House has passed, you’re in luck! I’m still fundraising for it through July and after that I will shut up about it. (Kidding, I’ll never shut up about it. But I will stop raising funds for it.)
I want to thank everyone who has booked a tarot lesson, subscribed specifically to support my Tin House workshop experience, and those long-time subscribers who have stayed with me through freelance feast and famine life. So far, I’ve managed to raise $1,002, which is an amazing amount of help. You lovely peeps covered my flight and a few of the extras I mentioned.
If you still want to support my experience, here is how you can help:
To help me offset the costs, I am offering donation-based Tarot readings to raise funds. I have two options for Tarot readings:
A virtual 30-minute reading done via Zoom. This is a great way to gain some in-depth clarity around a situation in your life through the Celtic Cross spread. You can schedule one via Calendly. Please note that my schedule fluctuates wildly from week-to-week, which is why you can only schedule a reading two-weeks in advance. However, feel free to shoot me a quick message if there is a specific date you want. I’m sure we can work it out. Suggested donation: $30 via Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle.
A quick and dirty three-card reading done entirely via email. Just fill out this form and you’ll get a response from me in 24-48 hours, including a picture of the spread. This is great for when you want to brighten your day, send someone a fun gift, or simply want to do a vibe check lol. Suggested donation: $15 via Venmo, PayPal or Zelle.
If you’re like “Girl, I just like you and want to support you” then I also have other ways you can do that!
Every subscription payment from April-July will go directly towards paying for Tin House. If you’re already a paid subscriber, THANK YOU. My Tin House experience would be impossible without your support. If you are on the fence, a reminder that paid subscribers get:
Full access to the archive
Subscriber-only posts where I share my accepted pitches, residency and intensive applications, query letters, LOIs, templates and other miscellaneous material that I used to get published.
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If you are feeling extra generous and your last name is Warbucks, you can send me your donations via:
Venmo: inesbellina
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I will also gift you a year-long subscription for any donation you make. Please note that when I say “suggested” I really do mean suggested. If you have $2 to spare, I will graciously accept those, thank you profusely, and comp the subscription.
And to everyone who is like “IN THIS ECONOMY”, I totally understand! It’s enough that you read my work. Truly, thank you.
What a wonderful post! This was so encouraging to read, and I found it super useful. Thank you both for sharing!