Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Essays: a request for advice

A friend has given me to read a fine, interesting, moving personal essay. He would like to publish it somewhere. If you were a personal essay about finding a vocation, with references to William James and Shelley where would you want to be published?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it depends on how the vocation ended up being found. For example, if your friend went on a hike through the Colorado Rockies, then maybe "Outside" or "Sierra," but if the epiphany came in a psychologist's office, then maybe "Psychology Today."

Basically, I think "vocation" is too large a category to really define what an essay is about.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Dave. It's not a magazine piece, it's truly an essay in the old-fashioned sense of the word and needs to be in a little magazine, I think: a Kenyon Review-type place, I'm thinking. So that it's not geared toward any one vocation, it's about the process of coming to find a vocation, about vacillating between wanting a career (traditionally compensated) and a vocation (non-remunerative but spiritually important). It's literary and personal and philosophical. Does that make more sense?

Anonymous said...

"Does that make sense?"

Yeah. Sounds like my life.

Gosh, I don't know the answer then. I'm too lazy to search for pubs like that, so writing like that always ends up on my blog. Or I get some crazy idea of a larger-scale project (like this one) that never gets off the ground.

Anonymous said...

You could try Salon.com's life section