“What was your first publication?” — T.H.

Well, if we’re going to use the basic definition of publication as in “a work that has been produced for public consumption,” then it would have to be the school newsletter, which came out monthly on mimeograph, from Brookwood Elementary in Hillsboro, OR. I was in second grade at the time, which logs in at around 1972 or 1972! They published a poem I wrote about butterflies getting into the butter at a picnic as well as a little elephant sketch I shared.

I write across forms, so I have several firsts to fondly recall. More officially…

• I published a cinquain in Reader’s Digest when I was a junior in high school (1982) and published several pieces for the high school newspaper and the local community college paper and for my internship with Hill & Knowlton.
• My first paid publication was in a local Thrifty Nickel type newspaper in the mid 1980s, which published a short article I wrote about the history of Mother’s Day, and then another piece about the history of flea markets.
• My first editorial that wasn’t published in a college publication appeared in The Chicago Tribune in 1990, a commentary on the large amount of packaging in my lunch bag.
• My first short story, “A Fish Story”—a tall tale about catfish gigging—appeared in HairTrigger (volume 13), the literary journal for Columbia College Chicago, in 1991.
• My first published poem (“Driftwood,” about a ghost crone in a derelict boat haunting a bay) appeared in Moon Journal some years later (1997).
• My first published essay was “Intersections,” which appeared in Weber: The Contemporary West in 2014; it won the Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Essay Award in 2014 and was nominated later for the John S. Burroughs Nature Essay Prize. It recounts an experience I had as a girl hiking into an abandoned homestead and being surrounded by a large herd of Roosevelt Elk.
• Still working on that first novel publication!