Pitch clinic, week 4
I am reviewing pitches sent by freelancers. As a reminder, if you want to send one my way to get feedback, please email jessica dot reed at theguardian dot com with the subject PITCH CLINIC. Or write it here on Medium and tag it #PITCHCLINIC. Your submission will remain anonymous.
PITCH NUMBER 4
Hi Jessica,
Thank you so much for creating the pitch clinic!
I have a personal essay about my parents’ addiction to amusement parks, and how they used theme parks as a unique, hilarious, and often sad attempt at recovering from a family tragedy that still plagues us to this day.
The constant visits to theme parks during my childhood were really just a symptom of our other, more profound, feature. My parents were both US diplomats, but a milder form of something known in our Foreign Service family as “disaster junkies.” We first moved to Zimbabwe in 1983, just after The Matabeleland genocide started. From there, we moved to Tijuana, Kenya, Bolivia, and Ethiopia. When I was teenager, Mom was stationed in Bosnia just after the war. The US didn’t allow dependents to follow because the country was still filled with leftover undetected landmines.
In between each gig, we would go back to the States for the summer — a requisite vacation known as “home leave.” It was then that we would go to amusement parks. My parents are adamant that we were a “normal family,” no different then everyone else who went to Disney World.
But as it turned out, we were a different family. We were like those undetected Bosnian landmines, waiting for someone to misstep and blow us all to smithereens. The explosion happened when I was twelve and we were living in Kenya. My thirteen-year-old, troubled brother shot off my father’s rifle in order to try to impress one of his friends. Thankfully no one was hurt, but Dad had brought the gun into Kenya against Embassy policy. When it was discovered that he had a firearm, we were asked to leave the country, and my father’s career was all but over. We didn’t know where we were going and we had no real home in which to return.
From that year on amusements parks were no longer our typical American vacation, but instead a form of triage — a balm that, if applied regularly, might give our family a better chance at survival.
This essay is similar in tone to Well Tower’s essay, “The Old Man At Burning Man,” and also speaks about the complexities of families much like David Sedaris’s essay, “Now We Are Five.”
I have written for Roxanne’s Gay’s The Butter, as well as Brooklyn Mag, and Narratively. In 2013 I penned the weekly column [REDACTED]. I recently completed my MFA in nonfiction at Columbia University.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
PITCH GRADE: B+
Why I liked about this pitch: I can tell you can write. I also like the outlets you have been writing for. I can tell you have a very good idea as to what the end product will be. You show enough signs of being able to write with wit and humor. I really like the idea of “disaster junkies” parents — good fodder for laughs. The story is wacky and unusual enough. Now you just have to deliver.
What I didn’t like about this pitch: I worry a bit about the flow of the piece. There’s one “twist” (the gun story), but what else will make readers stick throughout the piece? What will give it rhythm? And you don’t exactly explain what it is about amusement parks that provide a balm for their existence — or this effect it has had on you.
Would I publish: This is hard. I rarely publish essays like that (Sedaris style), because they need to be SO, SO GOOD for it to work. I would probably ask to read a first draft on spec, but perhaps would tell you to try other websites which are better suited for this type of writing.
