How To Publish a New York Times Essay, With Corvette Hunt

I have been reading Corvette Hunt for awhile. Corvette has been a contributor to Huffington Post, as well as to The New York Times, but it was a piece that ran in The Times on June one of this year, in which we learned that he’s writing a book, that got me to contact him. So let’s talk to him about how to publish a New York Times essay. It’s a goal for so many writers and Corvette has not only done it, but has done it several times. We’ll discuss that, the upcoming book and how it’s going and much more.

Read along while you listen in to the conversation we had. This interview has been edited from its original format.

Corvette:  Hello, Marion.

David: It’s great to have you on the show.

Corvette: Thank you so much. I am so thrilled. I am so thrilled to be here. I can’t believe it.

David: Well, we’ve read that you came to New York in 1993 and earned a scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Congratulations. And where you studied modern dance for two years until you discovered a far more unconventional, but appropriate medium, drag. And you began working for a famous stylist. You went out on the Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet tour, and then opened a tattoo and hair parlor in Brooklyn. So with all of that behind you, when did you start writing?

Corvette: Ah, you know what? I started writing in school when I realized that I was a very, very slow reader. And in middle school, we had book reports, and there was an assigned book, and then there was extra books. And so I could barely get through the assigned book. But what I did with the extra books was I went to the library, and I found a book that by the jacket cover, a story could unfold. And based on that jacket cover, I wrote the story. I made it up, and then I wrote my book report. And those were the better book reports of my career in middle school. And so I think that’s where I learned to lie and create things, and live in a fantasy world. But he did it because I had to. And then with this book, again, I did it because I had to.

Marion: So from book reports where you found your fantasy life, your lying self, as you like to say, apparently, now I find you in Huffington Post and knowing how to publish a The New York Times essay. That’s a pretty fast and furious arc. So how did you start writing professionally?

Corvette:  Well now I’m writing about the truth of myself, and I’ve done that also out of necessity. I felt that there was, I lived my life, and I had made some really remarkable childhood dreams come true. And I was in this place. The Madonna tour had ended, and I thought, I had such a panic attack. I thought, I’m not going to make it home. Something’s going to happen to my plane. My life is finished, because I’ve completed the things that I set out for myself to do. What am I going to do next? And because I’m dramatic, I felt like the ocean spoke to me and told me, “You’ve done all these things, but now you have to tell about them.”

Marion: Beautiful.

Corvette:  And so I thought I would tell about my journey, and my conflicts with my childhood, and my own inner saboteur that followed me from Colorado to New York, even though I didn’t invite that, it showed up with me. And that’s the journey that I thought would be of interest and of use to the world today. And so, yeah, thank you.

Marion: Well that’s great. And so that’s the book that this referred to, and let me get the readers back with some context. It was June 1st of this year that you published a piece in The New York Times that every one I know sent me to read. It was the best way I know to introduce Pride month. It’s entitled Everything a Drag Queen Taught Me About Parenthood. It’s a perfect piece of memoir. You curate beautifully how drag healed you, and we’ll provide a link to our listeners, to the piece. But I know from writing memoir that memoir informs us as we write, and you write in that piece, quote, “The power of drag confronts the idea that any human should hide.” End quote. So here’s the question. Did you figure that out before you started writing the piece? Or as you were writing it, did you figure out that the power of drag confronts the idea that any human should hide?

Corvette: After. That is what saved me. That concept is what saved my life as a young adult. And really, the inciting moment that happened was, I woke up sort of the writer in me, woke up when I was at the parade, and I was feeling this wonderful feeling. If you’ve ever been to a gay pride parade, or you know, this actually was-

Marion: Oh yeah.

David: I’ve been to a few. Yes. I have.

Corvette:  Okay, so I’m glad I don’t have to describe that. But it’s such a powerful feeling, and it’s an in your face feeling, and there’s everything. There’s color, and there’s sequins, and there’s debauchery, and it all came from a revolution. It all started from a riot. And so there’s something really beautiful about that. And I wanted to share that with my son, and I felt I wanted him to see this culture the way I saw it, because this culture is going to be important to him as he grows up, or not. He’ll rebel against it. But I wanted him to see it, and I felt so good and strong. And then this one comment from one other human being took me to a place of so much pain, and so much shame, and so much anxiety, and I thought I am doing the wrong thing. And I no longer felt proud. I no longer felt joyous or happy.

And when that moment changed, that was what I thought. I have to write about that. And so I did. But you know, that was one of your earlier podcasts. I think it’s Lisa Cron. And she says, “If you feel like you’re going to vomit, grab a trashcan, and keep writing, and that’s when you’re doing something right.” And this piece really was, it was, I vomited it out and then I had to make sense of it. And when I started looking at it, then all the little circular moments started showing up. Everything, you know, like that man said to me, he gave a prediction by saying about my son, some life he’s going to have, in a negative way. And after I got through feeling so upset by it, I realized I had heard those words before, and I heard those words being spoken to my parents about me when I was a kid. So there became the task of writing, of tricking a reader into reading my entire life story in 1,100 words.

David: One of the things I was really impressed with is, I think you’ll agree, that details can make or break a memoir, even an essay which is memoiric in its perspective. And some writers put in way too much detail, and some don’t put in nearly enough, and you don’t know what’s going on. And I think you seem to have a jewelers eye for the exact right detail to put in. So if I may read, in one of your pieces, you wrote that, “My greatest childhood memory was finding a pair of emerald green satin pumps in the back of my mom’s closet. The closest I came to a personal power as a kid was when I stole those shoes, put them on and dip, dip, dipped down the sidewalk of my suburban neighborhood.” Now if that does not conjure an image and gives us just the right amount of detail, I don’t know what does, but talk to us about making those decisions in your work about which details to use and which ones not to use.

Corvette:  I think the details are the one thing that I know I have. I think that, you know, I’ve never thought my writing was very good, because my grammar is atrocious, and sometimes I just throw things down, and I let people read them, and they’re like, “I am so lost. I don’t know where I am.” But I don’t know. When I’m writing, I feel like I’m painting with a paintbrush. So everything to me is brushstrokes, and those details ground me back in the story. And I’ve actually learned how to use the details to bring the reader back.

Marion: You have.

Corvette:  If you’re going to go big on taking the reader back through time, you kind of have to ground them back into the present with sensory details, sensuality.

Marion: You know, which brings up a point that I want to bring in and that later on in that same piece, and I know the piece that David’s referring to, I know that piece really, really well. As you can see, we’re big fans. And so that same piece, you walk into a club in downtown Manhattan and get approval for exactly who you are, and it makes the reader cry. I burst into tears the first time I read it, but it’s a piece that starts with shoes and takes us into a club. But you eventually end up speaking to us about debate and censorship.

So how important is it to you to take us further than just the details? In other words, every new memoir writer gets stuck in their own details, and they forget that we’re not reading for what you did. We’re reading for what you did with it. You do that in that piece. You take us into this whole idea of what censorship does to a soul. So is that what’s got you out there writing, is the bigger message?

Corvette: That is the big message. It’s so simple. But that’s what fires me up. The wonderful thing about this last essay in particular, so many people wrote back to me. The thing I was most nervous about was admitting to feeling shame. And especially to kick off Pride. I didn’t want to do that. I thought it was such a bummer, but I had to. And so many people responded back to me that they’ve had those moments as an adult where they found there were emotional scars that they thought they’d dealt with, and they thought were gone, and they’re still there.

And so I think it’s when I see the voice, and I also talk about it, I see the voice in myself. I look at my son and I see. I want him to have a beautiful life, and I want people to love him, and I want people to accept him. And if there are things about him that make him difficult for people to connect with him, I’m going to want to sort of censor those things. That is is a big challenge, I think, of parenthood.

David: And that brings me to another point about this piece, about being a father during gay pride, and sort of the shame that you experienced and fearful about sharing that shame, you also talk about the true place of the birth mother of your child. And we’d like to talk a little bit about that. But also I think what’s fascinating, do you come to these ideas during the process, or do you need some time and distance after that’s happened to get perspective in order to write about it?

Corvette:  Usually I start right away, and most of the times what I’ve started with ends up being a file that never gets used, but I keep it on my desktop, and it nags at me, and it nags at me. And usually when I’ve found an idea on what I’ve thrown down into a document, once an idea appears, then I go back to it, and then I’m obsessed, and then I won’t step away from my laptop or my iPhone, and I’m constantly writing and writing, and editing and editing, and then eventually something emerges, or it doesn’t. But yeah, usually I start right away.

Marion: You have a surprising range. One of my favorite pieces of yours is the matzo ball soup piece.

David: Oh my gosh. Yes.

Corvette:  Oh, I love that.

David: I can so relate to that with the food.

Marion: You can come and cook at my house any time, and your matzo ball can sink any time you want, but let’s give the listeners a little context here.

Corvette:  Of course.

Marion: You’ve got this great ambition to fit in, to assimilate, to be part of your husband’s family, to have them like you, just like you. And you got some tattoos, and you got some pink hair, and you guys are gay,, and he’s Jewish and you’re not. And so what do you do? You decide that you’re going to make the matzo ball soup that year. It’s like, what are you crazy?

David: But it’s not even the matzo ball soup. It’s the matzo ball soup that Bubby, his husband’s grandmother had been making for the longest time.

Marion: I was screaming. My heart is pounding as you’re getting through this piece. So talk to us about that choice. And then also, you’ve got to tell us if there’s more food writing in your memoir future.

Corvette: I chose food, because one, there was a gaping need for it. Bubby had quit, and I mean there’s more Bubbies, but they were like not taking it on, and I couldn’t understand why. I thought it’s soup. It’s chicken. It’s a few ingredients, and it’s some beautiful, golden matzo balls. How hard can it be? I’m going to do this, and I’m going to be the hero of this family, and this will be my way in. And it was. It was my way in. I still make it to this day. I’ve made it every single year.

David: But for our listeners, it was your way in, but it was a backfire.

Corvette:  Absolutely.

David: Let our listeners in on how it backfired, and how it let you in.

Corvette: So what I wanted to be was I wanted to be the hero that brought this dish that is very important in the meal, and also in the tradition, and the ritual. And I wanted to bring it in as a hero to the culinary appetite of this large group of people. And I also wanted to bring it in as a token of, I want to be a part of the family. And it ended up being that I messed it up so terribly that we had to buy everything. And I remember on the way there, and my husband said, “We don’t have to tell anybody.” And I said, “But they’re going to ask me. I know these women. They’re going to ask me what my secret was.” I’m not going to start out what I had hoped was going to be a beautiful tradition by lying. But what surprised me was when I told them how I messed it up, they cracked up. And that was the connection, because they were like, “Now you understand why none of us want to touch the soup. You finally get it.”

David: Exactly.

Corvette:  “You thought you were too cool for school, but you actually are just like one of us, and understand the perils of this dish. And so I forced myself to do it again the next year, and the next year after that.

Marion: And that’s the best kind of assimilation there is. That’s true. And that’s what makes everyone who reads that story cry, is because the human quality of it is fantastic.

David: And I think it’s also, talk about details, which we were just discussing. I think being a food writer, I think what makes it so special for me is I am not Jewish. I come from a Portuguese family. My generation, no one makes our mom’s and aunt’s and uncle’s any of their dishes. None of them have done it. So I’m the only one who has reached into the family archive and started making some of those foods again. So while you’re trying to assimilate into a different culture, a different family, I was trying to continue what we had in our family. And so what you did with Bubby’s recipes is how I started my food writing career, trying to copy and mimic my grandmother’s. So I think it’s such a universal idea, and what you did was you use the specifics of your life, the very unique specifics of your life, and made a very universal story.

Corvette:  Thank you.

Marion: It’s beautiful thing, Corvette.

Corvette: Thank you.

Marion: Gorgeous piece of work.

Corvette: I will add to that, because you asked the question before about details. And I will have to admit that story, the heart of that story, did not emerge until I stripped a lot of the details away, and I stripped them out, because I handed it in, and it got rejected as being it was too long. It was saturated with way too many details, because that’s what I thought was going to bring the reader into the story was like, how beautifully can I tell this? But when I stripped some of those things out, I realized that it wasn’t about what I thought it was. It really was about that simple connection.

Marion: There you go. That’s a great writing lesson. That’s a great writing lesson.

David: Yes. I was going to say, Marion always tells her students that you rarely are writing about what you think you’re writing about. You’re not writing about matzo ball soup. I’m not writing about Portuguese food, my mother’s carne asada. We’re not writing about those things. We’re writing about assimilation. We’re writing about traditions being handed down. We’re writing about not losing history, or whatever it happens to be. It’s rarely what we think we’re writing about. And sometimes I know, for me, I have to keep writing to understand what I’m trying to say. And it has very little to do with this topic, but I express what I’m trying to say through that topic.

Corvette: That’s the magic.

Marion: Yeah. It eliminates fitting in better than any tale I know about how you can’t show up and be better than the family you want to be part of, that you can’t show up and be the hero, but aspiration gets us into so much trouble. And I can see when you strip that thing there, what we feel is the raw human emotion of our own aspiration and where it’s gotten us in way over our heads in so many times in our lives. And when they laugh and say, “That’s why we don’t want to make it.” And you become one of them, truly, you get what you want, but you get it in the best possible way. And that’s why we just start crying right down our faces reading that piece.

David: And so reading the other pieces that you have in the HuffPo and also the hallowed halls of The New York Times, this book idea formed. So tell us when did this form, and how did it form the idea to write a book?

Corvette:  The book came first, and the idea to write the book was something like everything else was always nagging at me, because I decided to write it. I decided to write it when I was in Tel Aviv at the ocean, and the ocean spoke to me, and I had that whole moment. That’s when I decided I would take on the weight of this book. My first agent that I started working with, she thought, “Why don’t you do some smaller pieces?” Because she was getting a little bit, we’d created a memoir proposal. And one of the frequent comments from editors was this guy does not have a platform. This author needs to have a platform. And so she said, “Why don’t you start writing smaller stories and seeing if you can publish those?”And I had no interest in doing that.

I thought, I have the Holy Grail of my whole life story that I have to write this masterpiece, and I’m not going to bother with, you know, how dare you tell me to turn out a small story? It’s not a small story. It’s a big story. And it just happened to be that the very first piece that I did on the closing of Roseland was a very big moment in the book. And I thought, I can turn this into an essay, because part of the bigger book is about this wonderful world that I experienced in New York. But while I’m experiencing it, it’s disappearing. And so the Roseland thing happened. It was like one of the last monuments in my book that was destroyed, that was demolished. And I thought, I can write a small piece, and I will submit it, and I’ll see what happens.

Marion: That’s great. So to give the listeners a bit of a context, platform really means, when a publisher says that, or an editor says, that it means, where can we find you? And how are you building a readership? What readers can you bring to this that we can guarantee they’re going to buy this book? And those are the readers like David and like me who have been following you from piece to piece, reading your stuff going, “Where’s the next one? Where can we find him?” And that’s the kind of true development they want through your career so that there’s going to be some guaranteed readership. And Roseland, why don’t you define what Roseland is? I’ve certainly been there. I grew up in New York City, but for someone who is from out of town, what was Roseland for you, Corvette?

Corvette:  So Roseland was one of these big gorgeous ballrooms. And I wish I could tell you exactly when it was designed and built, but it was such a spectacular venue-

Marion: In Midtown Manhattan.

Corvette: In Midtown Manhattan. And there were so many of these places, just splendid theaters and big masterpieces, really, architecturally inside, and they were things that I thought would always be here, because it seemed like they always were there, and now most of them have been demolished, and they no longer exist.

Marion: Yeah, it’s true. So how do you fit all this in with your busy life? You’ve got your own business. You’ve got marriage. You’ve got fatherhood. You’ve got writing. How are you fitting in this book writing? Are you a very highly disciplined person?

Corvette:  When I’m doing it, I’m doing it, and when I’m not, you know, right now I’m doing it, and my sink is full of dirty dishes. So that means I’m at work. So right now, I’m pretty disciplined.

Marion: Spoken like a true writer.

David: It’s interesting. I’m the absolute opposite, because when I’m writing, my house is never cleaner, because I procrastinate, and procrastinate, and procrastinate, and I clean the house. So you always know that I’m writing when my house is extraordinarily clean.

Marion: You can always know that I’m writing when I’ve got something like a six or seven part Indian recipe going on the stove. My husband will come in, because I’ve never cooked Indian before, of course. And he’ll come in and he’ll say, “What’s the deadline, and how far over it are you?”

Corvette:  Exactly. Well, I will accept that as an open invitation to both of your houses, because that sounds like a much better scenario than where I’m at. I just know that if I do one dish, it’s going to lead. I’ll have the cleanest house, David, like you, you know?

Marion: Well thank you, Corvette. This has been a joy. We’re so excited for your book.

Corvette:  Thank you so much.

Marion: We’re going to be waiting. I have a Google search on you now, so every time you write something, I get a ping.

Corvette: All right.

Marion: So get back to work. Would you, please?

Corvette:  Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, both of you.

Marion: We’re delighted.

David: The writer is Corvette Hunt, and his skewed and marvelous sensibility can be found at corvettehuntworks. We hope this interview will inspire you on how to publish a New York Times essay. It should. And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY, and listen to us wherever you go.

Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page. 

Want more of a writing education? Come join me in one of my online memoir classes. They run all the time and all of them will help you get where you want to go in your work.