Sauce Magazine Seeks Food Essays

Thanks to Donna V for this notice.

Sauce Magazine , the St. Louis Metro Area's Restaurant Guide, is seeking food essay submissions for a new column. So if you can carry on about cheese, wax rhapsodic about rutabagas, or write drool-worthy prose about your favorite food experiences/memories, write an essay and submit it to Sauce.

Essays should be around 900 words and 12 will be featured in a monthly column published over the next year in the magazine. The deadline for essay submissions is November 15, 2007.

If they get enough gastronomic essays, they may continue the column after 2008. See the editor's letter below for details.

Letter from the Editor of St. Louis's Sauce Magazine:

Hello wordsmiths and friends of Sauce!

I'm really excited to tell you about a new column we'll be starting in Sauce in January: a column made up of personal essays (aka narrative nonfiction or creative nonfiction), featuring an essay written by a different author each month. Having food in the mix somewhere is the reason such essays will fit in Sauce, but the real goal here is to spotlight great stories, exceptional storytelling and beautiful writing. This is one of my favorite writing forms, and I'm convinced that you'd all be great for this.

The essays can be about *anything* (really!), as long as food factors in somewhere -- either directly, as a main character or the main focus of the story -- a description of the first time the author ate an exotic ingredient, for example, or perhaps a story about experiencing the food in Italy -- or indirectly, as a component of the story or as a background element. A look at a family's kooky dynamic as told through a typical family dinner hour is an example; so is the chapter in Ruth Reichl's "Tender at the Bone" where she hints at her mother's mental illness by describing her mother's "quirk" of serving dangerously old food to guests. Absolutely any story is fair game here, as long as it's personal, real and original.

As great writers with diverse and interesting experiences, I'm hopeful that you'll want to contribute an essay to the column. But I'll have to ask you to bear with me a bit. Since this is a new column for us, and a kind of writing that we don't typically publish, I've been working out the best way to collect enough essays (12) to be sure we'll be able to publish a year's worth of columns. I'm casting a wide net, with the hope that enough of you will be interested in sharing your food memories, thoughts and insights that this new column will be a go. I hate to call this a contest, but I guess it sort of is...

So I'd like to invite all of you to contribute a personal essay that has something to do with food to Sauce by November 15, 2007. We'll publish the best 12, one per month throughout 2007 (and beyond, if we get enough responses!). We'll choose those 12 blindly; authors will be paid for published essays (and this column will be an exception to our normal practice of paying upon publication -- since we'll be collecting column content so far in advance, the selected writers will be paid in advance). Word count is 900 words. Please email (or mail) submissions to me, with "essay" in the subject line.

I hope you're as excited about this new project as I am. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call or e-mail me. Now, go dig up your favorite food memory/story and get writing!!
PS-- feel free to extend this invite to other great writers you know!

Cheers,
Katie O'Connor
Senior Editor

Sauce Magazine
1820 Chouteau Ave.
St. Louis, MO 63103