The Kind of Writing I Want to Publish

When I think about the kind of writing I would most like to publish as an editor, my mind automatically drifts to creative nonfiction—specifically, the travel essay. I think of PrairyErth, a book that I read in an Environmental Literature class as a sophomore, and I can’t forget the way the author’s writing made me feel. William Least Heat-Moon developed an auto- ethnography of sorts that captured a cluster of very rural counties in Kansas, and he styled it so that readers are absorbing the people, places, and events he comes across through his physical movement across the landscape. Heat-Moon tends to start with a broader narrative of the experience of walking or driving through miles and miles of empty plains, then zooms in on a particular person or community that can lend depth and clarity to the landscape. The writing is a “Deep Map” of the Kansas plains: an intimate exploration of a specific geographic region that is told through the lens of the author’s thoughts and feelings as well as the lens of locals. PrairyErth is extremely dense and only fit to publish in a literary journal as an excerpt, yet Heat-Moon’s writing has had a profound impact on my editorial vision. I was completely absorbed while reading his work, as though I was witnessing some sort of magic in a lesser-known part of the country.

Even if a personal essay (or a fiction piece) is not about travel specifically, I find myself most captivated by it if it details the author’s connection to a certain place or community. As a reader, I want to feel like I am part of a place, and I want to feel like the author is being vulnerable with me in describing their relationship to people and things in that place. To me, there is nothing more invigorating than having the experience of traveling somewhere through writing, even if the author or character is not physically traveling in the narrative. Setting, location, and landscape are all very important to me; they should be fleshed out well.

The kind of readers who would enjoy this type of place-based writing may be travelers themselves, but they may also be people who simply want the experience of escaping to another world, region, or time. Many people read because they want to escape—in fact, most all of them do. Genres like historical fiction, thriller, and fantasy may be apt for producing the effect of escaping, but I personally love writing that takes places in our present world and makes them feel both strikingly familiar and fascinatingly otherworldly. While reading Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, I felt as though I was seeing the commonly-overlooked Kansas plains through multiple lenses: through the lens of the author, a newcomer; through the lens of the locals whose family histories are firmly rooted in specific Kansas countries; and through the lens of the people who had lived in Kansas hundreds of years before. Heat-Moon manages to make all of these lenses come alive without deviating from the present moment, and this felt magical to me. If I could publish a collection of essays that gave other readers this same sense of magic, that would be thrilling.