After years of writing for free, my freelance writing career is taking off.
Tonight, Saturday night marks the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Last year, I told myself the next year had to be better. Then due to the bad wrist fracture, I suffered in 2021 and the plate the orthopedic surgeon had to put in my wrist — in 2022 the tendon ruptured from rubbing against the plate and I had two additional surgeries — one to remove the plate and also a tendon transfer, where the surgeon takes one of the two tendons from the index finger and “transfers” it to the thumb. So now I’m in the midst of intensive occupation therapy to retrain the tendon.
And I just spent four days in the hospital for what is called an ileus. WebMD explains an ileus this way: the large intestine, or colon, absorbs water and uses strong, wave-like movements to push broken-down food and waste to your anus so you can poop. When your intestine stops making those wave-like movements for a while, it’s called ileus.
So here I am a year later on the first eve of Rosh Hashanah once more, saying next year has to be better. You might be asking yourself did anything go right in her life this past year? Well yes, it did.
I’ve been writing memoir since 2007 and publishing my work in anthologies and literary journals. Some years, especially early in my writing career, all I’d publish was one piece a year. Anthologies and literary journals (when they’re printed) don’t have much of a budget, so they typically pay in copies. Two, if I was lucky.
In 2007 and 2008, while recovering from a severe depressive episode, I enrolled in a memoir class at a local writing center. We have a wonderful resource in Westchester, this writing center is housed in a building that used to be a train station and sits on the Hudson River. I missed going there in person during the pandemic, for classes and literary reading. It’s an intimate setting, conducive to workshopping and listening to authors read excerpts from their works.
Several strong pieces I’m proud of came out of these years of writing for literary journals. One piece published in 2010, was hidden in the Personal Narrative section of a psychiatric journal called “Psychoanalytic Perspectives.” The essay was called “Grace Under Pressure” and it was about an attempt at recovery from anorexia. Another was published in 2015 in The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and it was titled “Eight Months After A Suicide Attempt.”
I also studied memoir at a program in 2011 and 2012 at one of the YMCA’s in Manhattan, when I worked at an outpatient clinic in Queens. Once a week for two years I drove over the 59th St. Bridge and started the lengthy search for a parking spot. I learned a great deal from this workshop about writing from the character’s point of view and the well-known axiom “show, don’t tell.”
About two years ago, I started submitting essays to publications that don’t pay, but have huge audiences, such as the NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) blog. In their guidelines, they state “Unfortunately, we only accept a small amount of the submissions received.” I also wrote for Thrive Global, founded by Arianna Huffington, and The Mighty, a platform for all kinds of illnesses, including a large number of contributors to mental illness. I also set up an account on Medium, a platform for writers, and was soon asked to be a contributing writer to their “Parables” section.
I’d been pitching editors at some of the larger magazines with mental health-related stories, think Allure, Glamour, Self, etc. without success. Then in February of this year, I submitted a pitch to Good Housekeeping magazine about meeting my BFF in my fifties and it was enthusiastically accepted. After several back-and-forth revisions, the essay ran on Good Housekeeping.com in May. After I had that clip, more essays followed, in the online magazine Well + Good, Health.com and now I’ve landed an ongoing mental health assignment with a company that produces mental health content.
I was also able to use my clips on the NAMI blog and Thrive Global as legitimate clips, even though these publications don’t pay. Apparently, they carry enough of a cache with editors. Additionally, Medium sponsored a research-based contest for clinicians and my piece won second place. I use that clip a lot.
So when people say to me “what a year you’re having!” I wish I could say to them “You should only see the work and perseverance in the fifteen years that lead up to this year. There is no such thing as an overnight success.
Thanks for reading. Andrea
