NEW YORK CITY (1993) “Details Magazine”

“No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.” -E.B.White

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.