Tell It Slant, Third Edition, 3rd Edition

15

Publishing Your Creative Nonfiction

Essays end up in books, but they start their lives in magazines. (It’s hard to imagine a book of recent but previously unpublished essays.) . . . The influential essayist is someone with an acute sense of what has not been (properly) talked about, what should be talked about (but differently). But what makes essays last is less their argument than the display of a complex mind and a distinctive prose voice.

—SUSAN SONTAG

It’s 1993, and I’ve just received my copy of the Georgia Review, where my essay “A Thousand Buddhas” sits among the pages. It’s my first acceptance by a national literary journal, and I can hardly believe it. It took a long time to write that essay and even longer to figure out where to ...