Why I'm afraid to be a proper personal essay writer

I’ve been recommitting myself to looking into freelance writing again. It’s something I pursued more in 2021 and 2022, back when I worked for a newspaper and was building my portfolio. I even took a class! I also thought I was going to be a personal essay writer at this time because that is what I was reading and I found fiction very difficult.

That’s a whole story. And that’s the thing…

Some pitch calls have resonated with me and my experiences, but…do I want to share those experiences?

The biggest changes in my life—losing my teaching job, moving in with my partner—are full of interest but also other peoples’ business. My partner’s family is a big part of my living situation, and that’s a complicated situation that isn’t my story to tell.

Similarly, when I lost my job, there are just certain legal reasons why I don’t talk about the specifics. Instead, I can talk about the role of my mental health before and after.

But am I ready to tell about that? Do I want that published where people can dissect it?

I don’t think so.

So I’m moving away from personal essays, at least the kind in magazines and sites that would pay proper money. I might experiment with more literary creative non-fiction.

Ultimately, though, my most personal stuff has come out in poetry! I find that it forces me to be concise (even though I’m getting a 400 word poem published…) and not over-explain things or need to have specific details. Poetry has been what I’ve almost exclusively submitted. One poem I turned into a very short CNF piece, only to turn it back into a poem!

This means that I’m not chasing anything making remotely any money, which is a downside to be frank. (Like this? Check out my Patreon and Ko-Fi.) This was kind of fine until recently when I ran into some car trouble that cost thousands and just bought a new car. But alas…

I’ve been reading the work of Catherine Babb, who wrote about how the ladder of how to have this sort of career disappeared out from underneath those who got book deals off of personal essay (or even just Internet) writing in the 2010s. Heck, since 2021-2022 I’ve seen magazines I wanted to be published in, like Catapult, vanish—or be sold to a very questionable corporation with questionable intentions, like Autostraddle.

But I also think I have a line of what I want to share with the Internet in detail on a wider platform. I’m much more interested in cultural criticism and reviews when it comes to mainstream nonfiction. It’s hard to pitch those timely, though (especially when you work full time!), which is why you’re more likely to find them here or my Patreon, where I’m about to start working my way through analyzing Lucy Dacus’s debut album. I currently make very little reliably from this labor, however.

Have any of you had successful pitches or pivots into a second stream of freelancing income?

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