Since I’ve been so MIA lately, I’ve sort of racked up a few things to brag about (luckily!). The first one to report is my publication with Paste Magazine back in June. It’s called “Why I Spent My Summer Vacation Dressed Like Hermione Granger,” and it’s an essay about my experience at a Harry Potter LARP I attended last summer.
This was my first nonfiction publication with a professional magazine (though I have had work published in smaller markets in the past, this is really my first one being paid professional rates at a place that has an actual full time staff and an office). The process of getting this essay out there was pretty grueling and uncertain, but really rewarding—and definitely a learning experience.
Submitting to culture magazines is so different from submitting to literary magazines (a process which I plan to write about soon). But I think writing this essay, researching the process, sending it out there, and actually—actually—getting published (and prior to that, getting interest from WIRED and Vanity Fair) has caused me to really fall in love with essay and nonfiction writing. I knew I already liked reading it, and always felt most comfortable writing it, but now it’s even more ingrained in my writing conscious and subconscious. Plus, it’s another way to get my voice out there as a writer, even if I also identify as a fiction writer.
So if you want to take a look at my most recently published work, go ahead and check it out in Paste.
*This is just for my own tracking purposes, don’t mind me.*
Personal Twitter post
Paste Twitter post
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Paste Facebook post
Steph Grossman 