By Lauren Eggert-Crowe
WWS veteran Melissa Chadburn wants your work.
The Los Angeles literary rock star recently joined the editorial team at DAME Magazine and is looking for reported essays and lyrical journalism. If you’d like to work your Barbara Ehrenreich chops, stretch your Ifill and Didion and Bogado muscles, Melissa wants to work with you. This is not the hasty trendpiece end of the pool, but the deeper dives into research and reporting. You’ll be writing pieces with headlines on par with, “Why don’t doctors take women’s pain seriously?” and “Will SCOTUS let crisis pregnancy centers keep lying?” and “The Deafening Complacency of Melania Trump.”
“Independent, women-owned, and women-edited,” DAME’s tagline is, “For Women Who Know Better.” The outlet values critical analysis in the social, cultural and political spheres, and “breaks through conventional narratives.” Who wouldn’t want their name attached to such a classy, no-bullshit mission statement?
Journalism is in jeopardy in the current political climate, as it has been many times in this country’s history. Authoritarianism and fascism don’t like a vital and strong Fourth Estate, because journalism throws a shoe in the gears of the spin machine and its “alternative facts.” While misogynist, white supremacist would-be-emperors attack journalists, dismantle public education, and devalue critical thinking, journalists seek the complicated truths that sustain a democracy. This is why it’s essential that the voices of people who have been marginalized, vilified and caricatured under all these oppressive systems, get the headlines and the column inches to unravel the autocrat’s lies. Throughout history, many of the best story-breakers have been women. Women who are sick of the bullshit. Women who are curious, determined, and insightful.
I asked Melissa a few questions about her role at DAME and what resources she recommends for women writers who are new to journalism.
Congratulations on your new role as editor at DAME Magazine! What excites you most about this new endeavor?
Hey! Thanks so much. One thing I really love is discovering new voices and sharing them with the world. It was not too long ago I had my own creative crisis, around whether or not I could withstand rejection or if my narrative deserved any sort of space. Then a question was posed to me, Do you share your gifts with others?
I’d never perceived my writing as a gift or that there was some disservice in not sharing it. I can’t wait to share the gifts of all the other miracle people I know and have yet to know. There are so many people who are bright and talented and words really are our way out of this godawful mess.
Could you tell us a bit about why you chose DAME Magazine? What is unique about that outlet and how does it intersect with your interests as a writer and editor?
I think you’ll understand when I talk about that pain or loneliness of being misunderstood. I’d written a long time ago in an interview with VIDA about how it feels to be a woman in the world and I’d mentioned that it feels like being a hunted thing. I imagine the sound of high heels. On wet pavement. At night. This also gives me a keen sense of my surroundings. I often feel like I occupy all the hunted spaces . . . the queer space, the radical space, a fierce advocate for economic justice, a person of color, a person from the margins; I’m ALL The things. Which means there’s so many opportunities to be disappointed, especially with spaces rife with opinion. If I’m real, I’ll say I often am disappointed. Literary spaces that are misogynist, feminist spaces that are racist, queer spaces that are classist.
DAME is all the things. It’s where the love is.
An amazing, incredible knock-your-socks-off submission comes across your desk. What makes it great? What are the qualities about it that makes you want to snatch it up for DAME?
Growing up, I used to look into people’s dining rooms at night and imagine what it was like to live in those homes—to sit at those dinner tables. It also happened to be the time of condominiums here in L.A. There were big structures being built everywhere and I’d spend time after school playing in constructions sites, running around the skeletons of empty units. Pretending that with enough water and dirt and rock I could finish the project and decorate my room, with giant BOP posters of Alyssa Milano on my bedroom walls and one of those Ricky Shroder race car beds. Cause I want all the lives—I want a cabin in the mountains, a loft downtown, I want to wear sharp business suits in offices, or just sit around in an oversized button down shirt and paint all day, I want cats and dogs and maybe a couple of piglets, or I want no pets and three kids, or I want no kids and no pets but a house in the woods with a vintage stove that has one of those flapjack griddles on top.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m a sucker for a well-placed piece. I’m interested in stories that are hyperlocal, that give readers insight into a world they don’t often see. I love that intersection between lyricism and journalism.
I am currently interested in pieces that are more reported rather than opinion based pieces, pieces that require some research, reporting, and can possibly (but not necessarily) braid the author’s personal narrative in with the subject matter. Extra points if the piece does not take place in N.Y. or L.A.
For writers who have little experience in journalistic writing or reported essays, what do you suggest to strengthen those muscles? For those of us not used to doing research into current events for our nonfiction, how do we get over that intimidation?
Good question. A great reporting resource is the IRE/NICAR website for a small membership fee—I think for, like, fifty bucks a year you can have access to all of IRE’s tip sheets, story packages (their story packages explain how the reporter approached a particular story), and data library. I’d also suggest The Nation Institute’s investigative fund website that also has a lot of tip sheets on how to file FOIAs and things of that nature.
For women I also want to recommend JAWS: Journalism and Women’s Symposium. I joined JAWS a couple of years ago and their listserv alone has been worth it, but there are local chapters in every state that meet and host pitching workshops and they have an annual retreat.
However, the main thing I want to say is, BE Curious; before posing questions to someone else, look for answers on your own, research your topic. The largest hurdle with reporting for most people is interviewing and talking to other people. Which—I get it—people are scary, or they can be. Here’s where I’m gonna agitate a bit. Which people are scary? Powerful people are scary. To whom are powerful people scary? Powerful people are scary to powerless people. The problem with this set up is that less and less marginalized people are the ones who are telling the stories, who are doing the reporting. Who gets to tell our stories?
Personally, I’ve found so many folks suggest I’m not the right person to tell a story because, I belong to a group that is subject or impacted by that story. Like, maybe as someone who grew up as a ward of the court I can’t report on the child welfare system. To that I ask, well than who can? But ultimately I need to make sure that I show rigor and curiosity in my work, that I don’t give people a reason to say no.
Melissa Chadburn has written for NYTBR, Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, American Public Media’s Marketplace, and dozens other places. She is a contributing editor for TheEconomic Hardship Reporting Project. She is Editor-At-Large for DAME Magazine. Her essay, “The Throwaways,” received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
This is exciting. I can’t wait to pitch you a piece.