The staff of The Journal is in Chicago right now at the annual AWP conference. For those of you who haven’t been before, take my word for it: it’s overwhelming. That’s why this post isn’t about what I originally planned—I was going to tell you about what I learned at the panels I wanted to attend this morning, but I made the mistake of going into the bookfair at 9AM and got distracted. Four hours later, I was still wandering around, taking turns covering our table (we’re at G12—stop by and see us!), and meeting up with old friends.

While I’m disappointed that I lost track of time and missed not one but two panels with one of my favorite writers (Cheryl Strayed), I learned a lot from walking around and talking to editors of other magazines. I spent a while talking to some other nonfiction editors and writers and everyone kept asking me the same thing: “What do you look for in an essay? What’s your ‘dream’ submission?”

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, since I joined the editorial board of The Journal last spring, then took Michelle Herman’s literary publishing class this autumn. I’m sure everyone can remember telling someone, “You should read this book. It’s amazing,” and then being unable to explain why when pressed for more. I felt like that every time someone asked what I look for when I’m reading submissions.

I can tell you what I constantly look for: memoirs that deal with subjects completely unlike my own life (one of my favorites is Natalie Kusz’s Road Song, which is about her life after her family moved from their suburban California home to Alaska when she was six; I grew up in a home with more television sets than people, and I love that she shows me a world I otherwise never would have known) and nonfiction that deals with subjects I’m interested in (politics, current events, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, lives of working-class Americans). I gravitate toward memoir and immersion journalism. I value honesty in writers—though that’s a post for another time.

When I sit down to read submissions for The Journal, though, I try to suspend those judgments and look for other things, things that anyone can appreciate, regardless of their interest level in the subject matter. I want readers of The Journal to read something and, even if they don’t love it as much as I do, understand why I found it valuable. So here are the three things I look for in every piece of writing.

1) Beautiful language. I want the language to be as precise and clear as possible, but I don’t want it to be plain. I don’t want to have to stop and think about what the writer really meant at every paragraph break, but I do want to stop from time to time and think, “Wow.” I want the words to be juxtaposed in such a way that it is surprising, yet true.

2) A narrator who makes me think about something I haven’t thought about before, or who makes me think about something old in new ways. I sometimes hear people say, “I never want to read another essay about _____,” and while it’s true that I sometimes roll my eyes when I see writers doing the same story over and over, I love reading an essay when I know what’s going to happen but I end up surprised anyway. Put a twist on something that’s been done to death. Make me interested in yet another grief/loss/addiction/parenthood memoir because you have something to say that hasn’t been said before.

3) Structure that works with the content for a greater reading experience. I used to be anti-experimentation, and I still enjoy reading traditional narrative essays, but recently I’ve started to see the ways that experimenting with form can enhance the reading experience. I get annoyed when people value experimentation over all else, so that’s not what I’m saying at all—instead, I want to know that the writer thought about the structure of the essay and chose the best option for their piece. I don’t ever want to think that they chose a lyric structure because they weren’t sure how to handle narrative, or that they chose a narrative structure because they didn’t know that they had other options. In the end, I want the structure to help the essay without calling attention to itself.

I know you’d probably rather hear me say that I want to see a 2500 word lyric essay about traveling to a foreign country—something specific that would help you send me exactly what I’m looking for. But the truth is, I don’t always know what I’m looking for until I read it and think, “Wow, this is it.”