Head’s up vegan/vegetarians! Check out my new food essay in The @TorontoStar!
During this time of uncertainty for many freelance writers around the world, I somehow managed to sell my very first food story to The Toronto Star! The Food section is a place I never thought I’d have a byline, so I’m super proud of this one. Head’s up vegans/vegetarians (or anyone looking to reduce their meat intake), this is about Liquid Smoke, a must-have pantry ingredient to zest up your plant-based recipes (and since we’re all quarantined at home right now, this is something you will definitely be using more of. No more boring self-isolation meals!). Click here or the above image to read! I will update this post when it’s also published in the print edition!
APRIL 15, 2020 EDIT!: it’s printed in today’s print edition, in the Life Section!
I’ve been trying to break into The Toronto Star for years, so this is very special to me, and clicks are appreciated!
As I mentioned above, right now during such times of uncertainty, it’s hard being a freelance writer. Many of my friends in the industry are seeing their income drastically reduced. Freelance budgets are drying up at newspapers and magazines, most pitches are being rejected across the board, and there is a rising sense of anxiety in the industry. I’m super lucky to be a regular, daily contributor at eTalk as I blogged about previously. They’ve actually given me more work lately, so on top of my regular late night TV beat, I also do news hits in the morning, and even some entertainment roundups and special one-offs! Here’s my late night column from this morning that I really liked (feminist Ryan’s, holla!), a news hit from this morning (Swifties rejoice!), a special one-off dedicated to Mariah Carey, and an entertainment roundup for all of us stuck in quarantine. I am loving all the extra work, but I realize I am super lucky. Many thanks to every editor and publication who agrees to take me on!
As always, fanks for the support, my munchkins, and please visit the official Christine Estima dot com for more of my published stories, essays, and more!
Read my latest essay published in @WalrusMagazine !
Here’s something I’ve been keeping a lid on for some months, but am super excited to finally share! I sold a story to The Walrus! For my international readers, The Walrus is a Canadian magazine that could easily be likened to The New Yorker – a highly-curated arts and culture magazine with some amazing critical thinkers writing for and creating the magazine. It’s a national magazine, available across the country.
My essay, published today, is about the time last year when I found a roll of film on the curb and set out to find the lost photographer. It’s a really quirky story that involves a lot of six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon but also about expectations v reality. I may or may not mention Amélie once or twice within this piece. Check it out and share it with your friends!
So here’s something funny about this process of being a freelance writer that is related to this story – last year, another magazine (which shall remain nameless) bought this story. They sat on this story for 7 months. They edited it so it stripped out all the colour, flare, style, and tone of my writing. They were absolutely unreachable at times, and it was a super frustrating experience working with them. Finally, a publication date for this past January was set. They paid me in full in anticipation of the publication date. Then, ON THE DAY it was set to be published, I received an email from the editor, saying that they were killing the story because it was “too local” and not something that would appeal to people across the country.
What the shizz?
Not once in the 7 months that they had the story was the concern that it was “too local” ever raised. Also, that’s a bullshit criticism, you guys have read the story, do you find this story unappealing to people outside of Toronto? Rhetorical question.
And worst of all, before that publication had bought the story, I had pitched it elsewhere, & some places only got back to me after said-publication bought it. So I had turned down other publications for them! For those of you outside of the publishing world, you should know this kind of behaviour and practice is all SUPER UNPROFESSIONAL. I’ve had stories killed before, but not on the DAY it was to be published, for such a lame excuse, after paying me in full. Most writers I know have had similar experiences with them, and warned me about them. So in my reply, I told them exactly what I thought. May the bridges I burn light the way.
I subsequently erased ALL the edits they did on my piece, and went back to my true voice that they tried to strip from the piece. Sometimes editors try to “trim the fat” of a story, but any chef will tell you that the fat has all the flavour. Good writing requires a style and a voice, and I wasn’t going to let them convince me my voice needed to be trimmed.
Fast forward to this past autumn, The Walrus bought the story (and frankly, The Walrus is a much better publication, with a helluva lot more respect), and the process of fashioning and editing the piece with them has been light years ahead and beyond what said-shizz-publication was like. And I’m super proud of this end result. Because above all, I found a publication that nurtured and encouraged my voice and style.
There are a lot of shady things publications try to do to freelance writers . . . and most of the time, they get away with it. Being freelance means you don’t get the support of HR and you’re in this legal gray area most of the time. So I’ve learned that you have to be your best advocate in this business . . . because the world doesn’t owe you any favours. Hustle and work hard, and it will all sort itself out in the end.
And maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get paid twice for the same story 😉
(Yes that was tacky of me, but I’m not deleting it.)
Don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com for more of my published essays, stories, and more!
Check out my @VICE interview with #TIFF16 film director Alice Lowe
The Toronto International Film Festival was amazing this year, I saw so many films (as documented by this round-up I wrote for VICE last week), and the fest is always such an electric time to be on the streets of Toronto. Everything is alive.
Speaking of life, the film PREVENGE is about a pregnant woman whose fetus tells her to kill people. So OF COURSE I had to interview the director/writer/performer Alice Lowe. Check out what she had to tell me about women in the film industry and pregnancy stigmas over here on VICE.
Fun fact: I had first seen Alice Lowe in an episode of Sherlock (season 3 episode “Sign of Three“) and the whole time we were talking, her voice was just reminding me of one of her lines from Sherlock, “A GHOST, MR HOLMES!” and then a drunk Watson saying to her, “He’s clueing for looks.”
I am a gigantic nerd.
Check out the official Christine Estima dot com for more of my VICE essays and articles, and much more.
Check out my latest @VICE piece on #TIFF16 vs The Bechdel Test
It’s TIFF time already and time for me to review a whole bunch of woman-hating films so you don’t have to. Last year I reviewed TIFF films that portray fierce women in leading roles, now it’s time to review the films that can’t even pass a simple test like The Bechdel Test. Read and enjoy! (or hate it, I don’t care, I’m just a blog).
Don’t forget to check out all my VICE articles, and all my many other publications, at the official Christine Estima dot com!
Read my #TravelWriting piece in The Globe and Mail @tgamtravel #Travel section
Two essays published in one week? I feel pretty spoiled. Head over to the Life-Travel section of The Globe and Mail (a national newspaper here in Canada) and read my piece about chasing the lost art of the Viennese Ex Libris! It’s online today, and will be published in the print edition tomorrow (Saturday, June 18, 2016). I will update this post once I have the actual thing in my painted-fingernail’d-hands.
Edit! Turn to page 5 of the Travel section!
This has been in the works for a while and I’m super proud of how it all turned out. Working with the peeps over at G&M was really positive and I’m glad this went from pitch to published in a relatively short turnaround. Read the piece by clicking here or the photographs!
I’ve been really lucky over the past few years with how many editors and publications are willing to take me on, and who support my voice and writing style. Hopefully that can continue! Already, I have a few more publications that I’ve sold, slated for later this year, so when they come out, expect me to BLOG IT LIKE IT’S HOT.
Don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com. It’s got all my published works up there for you to read over a cuppa and a slice of cake. Enjoy!
Music Worth Writing About: my piece in @thepuritan’s #TownCrier
Remember a few months ago when my creative non-fiction piece ‘Sarajevo Roses‘ was published in The Puritan? The good peeps there asked me to contribute to their Town Crier section on the topic of music and what I like to listen to when I write. People ask me all the time what music is good for surging their creativity when they write. Here’s what I listen to. Maybe you’ll discover some new tunes that will inspire your writing. Click here or click the image above to read.
And as always, don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com to read more of my published works.
Trade safely, wastoids: my latest essay for @ViceCanada
Check out my latest essay in VICE about potential profiteering, race and gender discrimination, and drug trafficking occurring in the Bunz Trading Zone, Toronto’s rapidly-expanding online bartering flea market where no cash is allowed.
TL;DR – if you think coppers can’t decipher “420” or “smokeables,” think again. Don’t wake ‘n bake in the middle of a trade.
Don’t forget to check back here often, I have many more pieces (both fiction and on-fiction) set to be published soon (in fact, just yesterday I received another acceptance letter from a magazine!)! Yay writing! Yay publishing!
For more of my work with VICE, click on my VICE category, OR visit the official Christine Estima dot com for all of my VICE essays and more of my published work. Enjoy!
Check out my latest essay ‘Sarajevo Roses’ in the new issue of @ThePuritan!
Remember last summer when my essay ‘Sarajevo Roses’ was long-listed for the 2015 CBC Canada Writes Creative Non-Fiction Prize? They even profiled me on the CBC website (#swag). Well now I’ve sold the piece to The Puritan! It appears in their new issue which dropped today! And, best of all, you can read the piece in its entirety on The Puritan website!
It’s a piece about my time in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2008 when the former Serbian despot and war criminal Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested and transferred to The Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity during the Yugoslav wars and the siege of Sarajevo. The Balkans have a special place in my heart, as I backpacked through the region at a time when you could still see war damage on every street. The former Yugoslav countries (I backpacked through Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia) hadn’t yet applied for EU membership, and for many of them, tourism was brand-new, as they had just eased their visa-requirements. It felt like I was walking through an authentic European culture untouched (for the most part) by globalization, westernization, and homogenization.
This blog is so old, you can actually read my posts from my time there. Here’s one from my time in Sarajevo and Mostar. There are photographs in that post of the actual Sarajevo Roses, and other things mentioned in The Puritan piece, like the destroyed Olympic bobsled track and the To Be Or Not To Be cafe.
It was really great working with the peeps at The Puritan, they were full of great ideas and had so many insights for my piece and how I should develop it. The issue looks nifty so check it out in full on their website!
Don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com where you can find all of my published works and more!
Check out my story in @subTerrain Magazine, on the shelves now!
Grab a copy of the current issue of subTerrain Magazine and turn to page 4 for my Creative Non-Fiction story, entitled “Rue Berri.” It’s a piece about my time in Montreal last year when I found the apartment my grandparents lived in during the 1940s. Above is a scan of the first page to whet your appetite. Included in the issue is also some of my original photography! See my hastily painted fingersnails there? SCHEXY.
Some of you have asked me where to find all these literary magazines in which I’m published. In Chapters/Indigo, you can find them in the Literature/Arts/Music section of the magazine racks. At indie book shops like Type Books or Drawn n’ Quarterly, just ask the clerks for help but those shops always have a large lit mag selection, so here’s a scan of the issue in which I appear so you can find it easily!
Working with the editors at subTerrain was a dream, they were so kind and helpful. I’m so honoured to be included in the pages of this amazingly beautiful issue, I’ve been trying to break into them since, I think, 2001 or 2002-ish, when I entered a crappy, crappy story into their Lush Triumphant contest. 15 years later – success! See? That’s how long it takes writers to improve. It’s a slow process indeed.
Happy reading!
And, as always, don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com for all of my published works, and more!
Check out my new story in the latest issue of @EVENTMags!
I’m really excited to share that my non-fiction story, ‘Spray It, Don’t Say It,’ has been published in the latest issue of Event Literary Magazine, that for decades has published the best short prose and poetry in the country. I have been trying to crack into Event for 10 years (they are notoriously selective!), so I was delighted when they snatched this up with such kind words for my voice and style. The piece is about my time as a waif on the streets of Europe
And here’s my EVENT bio. Awww yeeeeeeah, dis mah shit. This is only a slice of my publications, my full list of publications can be found here
You can pick up Event at any bookshop in the country. As always, don’t forget to check out the official ChristineEstima dot com for more of my writing, performances, and recent news!
The Spadina Monologues 