Amber Leberman, Cool Person

This week, I’m talking about the amazing people I presented with at the Wind River Outdoor Writers Conference.

Amber Leberman

Amber Leberman gave the best presentation about submitting to magazines and how to keep your editor happy.  It was great! It was titled “Keeping Your Editor Gruntled.” Amber is the editor of the beautiful and august magazine Wyoming Wildlife. 

Afterwards we were urging her to write a book called Your Lazy Editor Loves You.  That was one of her main points: Your editor loves you.  She wants to love you.  Don’t make it hard for her.  Don’t be THAT WRITER.

For example, find out when he’s on deadline to go to print.  If you try to contact your editor on the week leading up to this, you’re going to get a very short answer, if any at all.  And, for heaven’s sake, don’t be that person who insists on continuing to talk.  When he says, “Sorry but I’m on deadline,” apologize and hang up. Deadline week is hell for them.

A lot of it is common sense ~ common sense that we lose when we’re wrapped up in our writerly agony. Query first ~ you don’t need to write on spec.  Don’t be difficult.  If the editor wants you to make edits, make them. Don’t be a prima donna. Get your stuff in on time. Make it your best work ALWAYS.  There are many reasons an editor rejects something, often not at all related to the quality of the work. Don’t take it personally. Be your best self. An editor will keep coming back to you if you do.

She was so charming and sensible in her presentation. She’s like, “Look. We want to like your work.  But we’re lazy, like everyone. Make it easy for us.” 

I am so stoked to get to know her and I can’t wait to hang out in the future and talk writing and herding cats ~ er, writers. She does a hard job and is amazing at it!

Here is Amber’s bio:

Amber Leberman is editor of Wyoming Wildlife, a monthly magazine for anglers, hunters and wildlife enthusiasts. She works with more than 50 freelance writers and photographers annually. Before coming to Wyoming, Leberman spent 13 years in various roles (including assistant editor, web manager and art director) with a nonprofit magazine group in Chicago, preceded by stints at Copley Press and the Chicago Tribune. She is an avid backpacker and fly angler.

Please check out Wyoming Wildlife and be awed!

Michael Lanza, Cool Person

I thought I’d spend the rest of the week talking about the amazing people I presented with at the Wind River Outdoor Writers Conference.

Michael Lanza

Michael Lanza lives your dream life. He really does. He spends his time hiking the most beautiful spots in America with his family, and then he writes about it and takes the most gorgeous photos. He’s a dynamo ~ he thinks nothing of hiking 20 or 30 miles. And he’s really got things figured out ~ he’s figured out a way to do all this and make a living at it at the same time. And over and above all that, he’s a really nice guy!

At the conference, he gave this amazing presentation about how you can have this amazing life and be this amazing creative person online.  He's really thought it through.

I love how he helps families get outdoors. His post about helping your kids love the outdoors is one of his most popular (“One Photo, One Story: 10 Tips for Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids”). This is on his fabulous blog The Big Outside.

You should really check out his book, Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks. It won a National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit. Read a lively excerpt here about meeting a bear on the trail.

Here’s his bio:

Michael Lanza is a freelance writer and photographer, award-winning author, public speaker, and for many years was the Northwest Editor of Backpacker Magazine. He created and runs The Big Outside, where he blogs about his outdoor adventures, including many with his family. His book, Before They're Gone—A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks, winner of a National Outdoor Book Award, chronicles his wilderness adventures with his wife and their young son and daughter in national parks threatened by climate change. He is an engaging storyteller and gives talks and slideshows about his work and travels as an outdoor writer and photographer, the impacts of climate change on nature, and getting children out into the wilderness.

I know I'm gushing, but he's worth it.

English Matters

What I’m Reading Today: Looking forward to reading a couple of friends’ manuscripts over the weekend!

I was on a panel at the English Matters Symposium last night in the U of Wyoming English department. It was a hoot!

I arrived a little early and sat in on a panel the reported the results of an undergraduate committee’s recommendations on improving the English major. They did a skit condensed from hours and hours of committee meetings. It was hilarious. Caliban was in attendance. And, of course, the committee had lots of smart things to say: make the mission/purpose guidelines more explicit, don’t wait to explicitly introduce theory until the senior year, etc.

My panel was after that. It was advice to English majors about becoming a professional writer or editor. Also on the panel were Alison Harkin, a freelance editor and writer and novelist who also teaches in the women’s studies department, and David Ludwin (David ~ you have no online presence.  Chop chop! :-) ), a technical editor and writer at the engineering firm where my husband works and a fiction writer. The moderator/hostess with the mostess was Meg Van Baalen-Wood, a technical writer and teacher in the English department, as well as a creative nonfiction writer. I’ve known them all for years.

First Meg introduced us and then each of us talked about our backgrounds. Alison is originally from Canada and moved to Wyoming with her husband who is a professor. She was lucky ~ she hasn’t had to advertise her freelance services much, and she was rapidly able to build a good steady clientele, mostly in health-related writing. I know she has a novel manuscript too, and by all reports it’s really good. David came to UW from Washington state to get his MFA and also became interested in our environment and natural resources department. While in grad school, he interned at the engineering firm and then they hired him full time, which was a number of years ago. He said he just got back to his fiction writing again (which I applauded).

Alison talked about how people idolize being a freelancer ~ stay home in your pajamas all day, etc. She said that’s really not true. It’s hard to separate your work life and your personal life as a freelancer, especially for her because she has a hard time setting boundaries. Also, as a freelancer, you don’t have a retirement or health insurance or paid vacation or sick time. And it’s feast or famine: you have a lot of work at once and then periods of drought.

David is the only technical editor/writer in his huge engineering firm, so he ~ like the rest of us ~ is totally swamped. Mostly he edits but he’ll likely be doing more writing in the future. A lot of the engineers and scientists he works with have had maybe one writing class in their lives, so he’s been setting up mini-classes to teach them writing and also mentoring their writing.

I talked about how it took me a long time to end up in English because, coming from a ranch, I felt I needed something “practical.” Well, you spend so much time at your job, if you hate it you hate your life, which isn’t practical. I mentioned that close reading is one of the best skills an English major can acquire (thanks, Caroline!).  I also talked about how I write in all different forms: professional and technical, marketing and promotion, journalism, academic, fiction, and poetry. Alison and I both said writing is writing and all forms contribute to each other.

Meg asked what we got out of our technical writing/editing jobs. We said, first, of course, a paycheck. But we also said it’s fun and challenging and rewarding and creative, and we’re proud of what we do. David and Alison both teach in different ways (and I have in the past), which they find very rewarding.

And we said a lot more really smart things! We had a decent crowd, not huge. Among them were Peter Parolin (head of the department and my friend) and Caroline McCracken-Flesher (my mentor and friend).  At the end I asked them whether all the other English majors had already figured out how they were going to make a living with an English degree. Hehe.

Questions of the Day: Did you get an English Degree? What did you think you were going to do with it?