How to Pitch ‘The Desk Dispatch’

How and what to pitch me for the new contributor essay series launching in January.

Pitches are now closed for 2024.

As I wrote in the announcement about my plans for the 2024 newsletter relaunch, I am opening up to pitches from writers for cultural criticism and personal essays in the 500- to 1,500-word range. I will be publishing one essay per month for each of the 10 publication months of the year and paying a rate of $500. Each contributing writer will retain full rights to their work, as written in a contract we will both sign. My ability to do this is based on paid subscriptions from readers. 

Note: Please do not share this in writers’ groups or general calls for pitches. I am one person—no assistant!—and do not wish to be inundated with pitches from folks who aren’t well acquainted with the newsletter.

I’ve long complained that there are too many food writing classes for people to take and not enough places for them to actually publish their work where it will be seen—and especially not enough places that will do rigorous editing and pay a decent rate. Because I’m not constrained by advertising or any powers-that-be (I’m the only power-that-is, and I’m granted that power through your support!), I'm also able to publish work from around the world that doesn’t have to appeal to a tourist gaze. My hope is to eventually have the resources to also sustain translators, when needed, in order to truly become a hub for international food writing that stretches the limits—in form, subject, and function—of what people think of when they hear those words. I’m aware that this is ambitious. I’ve got ambitions for the potential of this newsletter to launch a new publishing project.

What kind of pieces do I want to publish?

I want to open up this space for stories that bridge the gap between popular food media and academic food studies; cultural criticism that covers food with an interdisciplinary eye, bringing in politics, economics, art, and literature; and focused essays that illuminate ingredients, ideas, and movements in food. If you’ve not been a reader of this newsletter over the last three years, I’d encourage you to read either the archive or start reading now in order to understand the scope and tone. I’d love specific food dispatches from places in the world that aren’t well-covered, written by writers who live there. I’d also love formally inventive work that stretches the imagination about what “food writing” is and can be. 

What makes me qualified to edit your work?

I’ve worked in digital media since 2009. In addition to being a working freelance food writer for nearly nine years now, I spent five years before that as a copy editor at New York magazine. I’ve worked at Food & Wine, Edible Brooklyn, and Edible Manhattan; I’ve been a contributing writer at the Village Voice. My essays have been listed as “notable” in numerous editions of Best American Food Writing and Best American Travel Writing. In the 2023 edition of Food Writing, my piece “Restriction as Possibility; Lifestyle as Politics” opens the anthology, as selected by Mark Bittman. My book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, was an editors’ selection at Vogue and Amaz*n, and it appeared on best-seller lists at Bookshop.org and New Atlantic Indie. A collection of my essays in translation has been published as Desde mi escritorio by Spanish publisher Col&Col. I’ve grown the audience of this newsletter to over 30,000 subscribers since March 2020.

I’ll be bringing in co- and guest editors, when able, to ensure various perspectives.

How to Pitch

Send a no more than 250-word pitch to my email, with the word “PITCH” in the subject line, followed by a potential headline. (This small word count is meant to help keep the idea itself within the right scope for the final word count.)

I am not looking for PR pitches, gift guides, restaurant roundups, travel recommendations, etc.—unless the gift guides, roundups, or travel recommendations are meant to subvert and/or enliven the genre.

To quote curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: “‘Sub-’ not as in being underneath anything, being inferior, but rather as an undermining of power structures, of language hegemonies, of authoritative systems, of institutional hierarchies, of patriarchal heteronormative structures—all of which come from or are spiced with what sociologist Aníbal Quijano calls ‘the coloniality of power.’”

My email is freely available on the internet, but I will not be typing it here: I want a small barrier to entry to be that you need to find my email. Let the pitches begin.

Programming Note: I’ll be off from the newsletter until Monday, November 27, when I’ll return for a couple of weeks before an end-of-year break.

News

My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade to order in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. There are cocktail picks with a pearl on them, which are my favorite thing ever! Perfect gift.

Reading

Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, because I want to learn from outside media how people bring together various voices and ideas. The curator—a now-overused designation—is just another type of editor, right? I’d love recommendations on this subject.

Cooking

I’ve been in a cooking lull lately, distracted by work and news. This means we’ve ordered vegetable lasagna from local spot Spiga and been eating lots of spinach empanadas at local Argentine chain Viejo Almacén—only occasionally followed up by a flan topped with dulce de leche.