On Mentoring & Music Writing

A conversation with Abigail Covington

My last classes of the academic quarter ended on a high note last week, as Jenisha Watts, senior editor of The Atlantic, dropped in to talk about her career and powerful cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky” It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award, and she is now expanding the piece into a book.

Jenisha told students to lean into their own interests and unique experiences when looking for story ideas or jobs. She said she often reminds herself: “It’s a privilege to be able to tell stories.” Then, to everyone’s surprise, she offered to give feedback on any pitches they might have for The Atlantic.

Several students seized the opportunity, pitching her live in front of their peers. It was invigorating to listen, and to imagine their stories perhaps one day being published.

It also reminded me of how incredibly valuable it is to find people in this field like Jenisha, who are generous and willing to listen, mentor, or offer advice. I owe my own writing career to mentors who have guided me along the way, and I try to pass it on (including here at The Reported Essay).

Recently, I shared some of my own journey with “Your First Byline,” run by

Ryan Teague Beckwith

, which is a wonderful resource for understanding the many avenues to get into journalism.

This week, I am excited to share with you my Q&A with Abigail Covington, a writer and contributing editor at Esquire. She writes about music, politics, LGBTQ+ life, and pop culture, and her essays and journalism appear in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, Slate, The Nation, Them, Oxford American, and Pitchfork. Abigail also publishes a Substack, “Gimme Pleasure!”

Abigail recently published this longform piece in Rolling Stone: “Inside the Highs and Lows of Sapphic Pop’s Banner Year: For young queer music fans, 2024 was a dream come true. For artists like Chappell Roan, Muna, and Reneé Rapp, it was more complicated.”

Abigail has a BA in Creative Writing and Politics from the College of William and Mary and an MA in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was awarded a narrative nonfiction fellowship by the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism.

She talked about leveraging those early bylines, making a living as a freelancer, finding mentors, breaking into music writing and how she thinks about voice (drawing from poetry and comedy), especially in reported essays.

“I’ve had to learn how to embrace people who could become mentors later on, and build that relationship. It’s really just putting yourself out there. I’ve emailed writers and editors that I really admire, and stayed in touch with them.” — Abigail Covington

Here is my conversation with Abigail, which has been edited for length and clarity:

Can you tell us a bit about how you got into writing longform music stories?

My career has been a little non-traditional, because it is really born out of a very intense love for music. I was a creative writing major in college. I thought about getting an MFA, but really I wanted to be a music journalist. This was 2010, and I wasn’t quite focused enough to just go to New York and try to work at Rolling Stone. So I started blogging for free for a site called CoverMe Songs. A lot of my early years were spent trying to figure out how to do music journalism while also not living in the media world of New York, because I went to NYU for two years before transferring to William and Mary in Virginia, and I really didn’t want to move back to New York.

Abigail Covington.

You were doing it for free? That's always a controversial discussion. What was behind that decision for you and how did you make it work?

I just felt like: “Why would someone pay me to write about music?” It was in the blogging days. I used all of that free work to get an internship at the AV Club, which paid like $7 an hour. I got some money. I got some bylines. Every small byline, you can reference when you go somewhere else. But my bigger break was just pure luck. I wrote my first magazine feature for Oxford American. To be transparent, the only reason I had that opportunity was because my friend from high school randomly ended up being the managing editor of the magazine. They do a music-themed issue every year. I had never sent a formal pitch. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I put one together. It got accepted. And then that piece did really well.

Yes, it was included as a “notable essay” in The Best American Essays 2016.

It was. Not bad for my first big longform piece. But it was so weird. I thought: Wow, this is really cool. But at the same time I still had a job in marketing. It was my first introduction into understanding that there are a lot of different ways to be a magazine journalist. I felt like I was half in the door, and half living in a totally different world for money.

I’m interested in the role of music in your life. Why music journalism?

You can see this framed photo behind me? It’s a muscle T-shirt of Prince on his “Purple Rain” motorcycle. My dad loved Prince. From maybe six years old, I was obsessed with Prince. I’d written a few pieces about Prince for the AV Club, so people started knowing me as the Prince girl. Then when he died, music editors across town reached out to me, which is how I eventually ended up in Pitchfork. My parents were really into music. My brother too. Then in high school and college, I started getting into music history and music lore. That's how the journalism love started. I was always reading old Lester Bangs pieces. I got really attached to the world of music. It became more about the culture than the music.

So you were delving into some of the historical writing in magazines and longform. Did you think at that point that maybe this is something you could do?

If I’m going to be totally honest, I was a very unmotivated college student and 20-something. I didn’t really start gunning for my career until much later on. I was just focused on other things during those years.

Would you say that first piece took off, and then you had a realization?

That piece was what made me decide to go to journalism school. It gave me the validation that there might be a market for this kind of writing.

By the time I turned 29, I had published a story for Oxford American that did really well and was regularly contributing to Pitchfork and the AV Club, and I just got to a place where I felt like I needed to make up for lost time. Living in Chicago, I was sort of on the sidelines from digital media and entertainment journalism. Also, I think it’s important to disclose that I didn’t go into crippling debt for grad school. I had limited funds that I inherited from my dad after he died when I was in college that could cover a portion of the tuition. I do not live with a financial safety net today, but I had that resource at the time, and it felt like a huge leap of faith to use it on grad school.

I was almost 30. I didn't know how else I was going to go to grad school. I wanted the network. It’s a very expensive way to pay for a network. And you can get that network if you land in New York early. There are other ways to do it. But at my point, I felt like I needed the boost. I had written 5,000-word deep dives. But no one ever taught me anything.

So I went to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It made me a much better writer. We worked on profiles. It made me a much better thinker. But we didn’t spend much time on craft. I’ve learned the most about craft from working with good editors. Just doing the work.

What about pitching? How did you learn that?

I’m still learning how to pitch. The education never ends. I’ve just learned from experience. It has always been helpful if people share their pitches. I’ve learned a lot from them and, when I was first starting out, from seeing more established journalists’ pitches and realizing: “Oh, I’m way off.”

I often refer people to the Open Notebook Pitch Database, especially for science pitches.

Study Hall has a pitch database. It’s not free. But it’s helpful. There are even New Yorker pitches in there. There’s also a resource called “Approved Pitches,” which is a newsletter run by Rae Witte. She breaks down her pitches. Also Tim Herrera's Substack, “Freelancing with Tim.” Nieman Storyboard does great ones. Like Seyward Darby, the editor of The Atavist, has done a pitch dissection with Katia Savchuk. I think I spend the most time, in terms of my professional education, looking into dissected pitches. It is learning by doing. There is a lot you can teach yourself. I did a lot of reverse engineering of pitches and pieces I admired.

Once you got out of grad school, what was your next step? Did you have work lined up?

I was 30 years old. I had a partner in graduate school for social work. I thought: Oh shit, I need to make money. So I worked at an agency that did content marketing and curation for Spotify and all the big streaming companies. And I continued freelancing. I had great relationships with publicists. I was a regular contributor to Pitchfork. I was doing music writing, but not much longform, even though I wanted to. I hadn’t really developed the muscle yet to regularly have longform ideas. Then I got a job at Esquire. That was 100% through my Columbia network.

I was a weekend editor. It was a great job, because it forced me to write three to four pieces a day. I got that daily experience that I had never had. I realized: “Oh, this is hard.” Breaking news. I learned the differences between telling a story fast versus seeing a story and understanding that it could have big idea potential. Eventually I did longer stories for Esquire.

In 2022, I wanted to write this big essay when the LGBTQ+ backlash started getting insane. I had just gotten married, and I was thinking: “Why did I get married?” “Why did I join this heterosexual institution that until very recently my community didn’t even have access to? That led to a reported essay, “Proud of What, Exactly?”

Did it take a while for you to get comfortable with writing yourself into a story? Or was that the first piece where you did and you started to realize: “Oh, this is something I can do too?”

I’m a very reluctant sharer. I just never wanted to put myself out there on the internet. I was wary of personal writing. But I had a J-school professor, David Hajdu, who said: “You have a really strong voice. You need to start using your voice.”

I am gay. So I thought: “I will write about being gay. Baby steps.” That was a place I was comfortable exploring. My generation is the first to deal with the fact that we can get married, and we can form families—but we’re also navigating being inside the system and also outside of it. That conflict is a great space to look for ideas. Where do you have tension in your own life?

Maybe you could talk a little bit about learning to develop your voice and having that comfort of a story being a reflection of you.

I love writers like Samantha Irby. I love humor. There’s a lot of criticism that uses personal writing. But you also don’t have to use your voice everywhere just because you have one. I try to deploy it wisely, in service of something.

I would love to hear about your new piece for Rolling Stone, “Inside the Highs and Lows of Sapphic Pop’s Banner Year.” You delve into the lives of young queer music fans and the pressures on artists like Chappell Roan, Muna, and Reneé Rapp. I loved the sense of place details that we begin with, and then we go on this journey of reporting. There are funny moments, and surprising moments. You also have a moment of deploying your own voice. How did it come together for you?

Back in April I realized, as many people did, that a lot of these pop stars are lesbians. As a lesbian who writes about music and loves pop, I said to myself: “I have to tell this story.” It came from a place of pure interest. I’ve never had that feeling. I thought: This is my story to tell. But sometimes I let pitching become so monumental in my mind that I just don’t want to do it. I have a friend, Alan Light, a longtime music journalist, who encouraged me.

He noticed that when the All Things Go Music Festival released their lineup, everyone was a lesbian. I had been dragging my feet about writing a pitch. But when that lineup came out, I said: “Okay, I can use this event as part of my pitch, the news peg.” Before that, it was just an idea. Like what is the feature going to be? What is the reporting? “Oh, look lesbians are pop stars?” There just wasn’t a hook. But I really wanted to tell the story. I just didn’t know if there would be somewhere to ground it. Now, there was a hook. There were a lot of headlines out there already about a “lesbian renaissance.” A lot of quick takes. I really wanted to do something reported. I was determined to do the definitive piece.

My professor, David, had written a reported piece on lesbian folk music for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. I used that as my model. He reported it. He talked to the artists. David said: “You’ve got to give an editor a reason to believe that you can pull this story off.” Initially, they said you can have 1,000 words. I turned in 6,000.

Wait a minute, you just said I’ll do 6,000 anyway?

I mean, I said to my editor, Simon Vozick-Levinson, who is the deputy music editor at Rolling Stone: “I think it should be longer.” He said: “I agree.” This was a lot about budget. I had already said to myself: “I don’t care what somebody pays me. I’m doing this story the way I want to do it.” I kind of had a soft blessing from my editor to do more than 1,000 words, because the pitch I sent clearly showed it could be longer. I told myself: “I’m going to figure out how to tell the bigger story.”

But I would never advise someone to turn in 6,000 words when they were given 1,000. Just to make that clear. I had an editor who said: “Just do the story, and we’ll deal with it later.”

Did they pay you sufficiently? If the word count changed?

It was $500 for 1,000 words. But once I showed Simon my work, I began to advocate for myself. Can this be in print? Is there more budget in print for this story? So I got a shorter version of the story in print. Then I asked for more money, and I got more money. So I ended up getting paid $2,000. And I would only do that on a story that was really, really important to me.

My friend Katherine Reynolds Lewis, who founded the Institute for Independent Journalists, calls that process the “Three Ps.” When considering assignments, you’re weighing passion, pay or prestige. Those three areas are like moves on a chessboard.

Yes, and this one I was able to just put it in the “passion” column, and let go of the rest. It was a passion and prestige story. And I will be spending the next month doing the pay work that makes up for it.

You said you do content work. Is that enough to freelance magazine longform stories or deep dives when you're doing content work? How do you juggle that?

I charge an hourly rate. Right now, I’m also fact-checking a book. And I’m doing some Esquire pieces. So I’ll do magazine work, and then content work.

So this was a passion piece, and a voice-y piece. It felt in-the-moment, vivid details, color, the dialogue, story movement. Then you've got the tension within the piece. How did you map out the story?

I do a lot of scene explorations. I did a piece for Esquire on book bans in North Dakota, going inside the book banning movement. The book banning piece had a court case and legislation I could follow. But this Rolling Stone story had no plot built in. No clear narrative arc. I try to map out my reporting as I go. What’s the structure? But I wasn't able to settle on a structure before I had all of my material. When you don’t necessarily have a path, it can be helpful to ask: “How did we get here? What happened once we were here?” I feel like those two questions can help you create a path.

So when you have those two questions, how do you start to answer them in the beginning and like as you go through the story. Are you kind of planting the answers throughout?

I think the great thing about asking those questions is they parallel the classic opening of a reported essay or of a feature story—the scenic opening, or the flashback. It’s hard to argue your way out of that opening, because it’s just classic. It works for a reason. I’m also a big believer in the nut graf. What is this piece about? For me this was about the pressure of representation. I structured it in thirds. Here is the history. Here is where we are now. Here’s how it feels. Then in that third section, I branched it out. It was all a map, exploring how it feels for the artists, and how it feels for the fans.

During reporting, Chappell Roan’s publicist stopped emailing me back. I think the lesson here is embracing what happens along the way, and not freaking out. Then the day before All Things Go, Roan canceled on the show. That was pretty much when I gave up trying to get her to participate in this story, because her publicist originally said “yes.” Then crickets. Everyone was going to expect Chappell Roan to be in this piece. I felt like I had to address it. My idea was to try to use empathy. Drawing from some of the quotes that were already out there, like from Billie Eilish.

It’s a write-around.

Really it was. What makes reported essays so much fun is your reporting. You’re learning as you report, it’s changing, and you’re having new ideas. I changed in this piece. I was definitely an intense fan in my younger days. But as I was talking to the artists, I was like: “Oh God, this is a nightmare.” That’s why I love reported essays, because you get to fold your reactions to your reporting in. Although that wasn’t my intention going into this piece, I was able to fold in what I had learned. I also just got addicted to using that line: “Are you high?” When you step back and look at it from Roan’s perspective, it’s like: “You want me to talk about my sexuality with you?” Are you high?

You would think that you want the Roan interview, and that’s going to make it the piece, but then her backing out forces you to be more creative and lean on your voice more.

People love personal writing. They just do. I love it too. I love memoir. I love reflection. I love op-eds. I do think it made the piece better. I mean, do I think people wanted to see more from Chappell Roan? Yeah. But I think insights that come from the author can be just as compelling. I like seeing the way someone thinks. You can get that from quotes, from sources, but you can also get that from the author. If the author has a compelling way of being, if they’re funny, if they’re entertaining. I try to be fun to read.

Being funny is hard. Are there writers that you really admire for that ability to have that lively, funny personality?

Oh, man, yeah. Amanda Hess from The New York Times. Samantha Irby, I think is the funniest writer on earth right now. Ian Frazier, at The New Yorker has always been good at it. David Sedaris is obviously the king.

A joke is a narrative. A punchline is a surprise kind of twist, it’s unexpected.

I also think about that a lot with my writing. Long exposition and shorter sentences. A longer reflection on identity. Then, boom: “Are you high?” I have an instinct for humor, probably because I watch so much comedy. I love stand-up. Good comedians are great writers.

I know some writers also learn from poetry. I wonder for you, because you have that musical background, and songwriting has the rhythm, the chorus, the refrain–has that seeped into your writing consciousness too? We learn about writing not just from the people who do the exact same kind of craft that we do, but from all these different sources.

I’ve always been surprised that it doesn’t. But I will say I read one poem a day. I keep poetry in my bathroom so I read Louise Gluck instead of staring at TikTok when I’m on the toilet. I think Taylor Swift is a great writer. She just knows how to turn a good phrase. She’s really good at twisting words. Sometimes she has some pretty intense mixed metaphors. I also love Joni Mitchell, and she's a very sensual, creative writer. “You turn me on, I’m a radio.”

You have found generous mentors, but how did you find those mentors?

I’ve had to learn how to embrace people who could become mentors later on, and build that relationship. But it’s really just putting yourself out there. I’ve emailed writers and editors that I really admire, and stayed in touch with them. I have another fabulous mentor, Vanessa Friedman, who’s the fashion critic for The New York Times. I was her research assistant on a book. So any person that I've met that's in the field, I’ve tried very genuinely to nurture that relationship.

It takes some being proactive on your part, but genuine at the same time. Because certainly, especially for people who are getting so many emails and people asking for their time, you don’t want to be a burden. But at the same time, you want to find the people who are open to you too. It’s just sort of like pitching. You never know, there are no expectations. People might not be receptive. But you have to put yourself out there, and you just don’t know what will come back to you.

Totally, and that’s the thing, you don't know. If you’re an introvert, to put yourself out there, it’s hard. But that’s why you just try to connect with people whose work you really admire. I once sent a cold email to Jason Zinoman, who’s a comedy critic at The New York Times. I had started covering comedy a lot at Esquire and I didn’t have that language to describe why a joke is funny. It’s hard. So I followed a lot of his work to develop my voice, and I sent him an email. I was not looking for anything from Jason. But I just sent him an email, and now he’s a person in my network. And that came from a genuine place of me respecting his work.

Going into 2025, how are you feeling about the state of our industry now?

I’ve always felt like magazine journalism was a luxury I couldn’t afford. There are cycles. I’m lucky because I have content work. Journalism is not over. Don’t expect the worst. Start a Substack. Get a good paying gig, and save your energy for a story that you know you want to do, and then knock it out of the park.

With the recent election, and when it comes to being part of a marginalized community, many people are feeling like this is a scary time. Do you feel that there’s a renewed mission as a journalist?

When it comes to my writing and marginalized identities, I am scared every day, and I think it’s encouraging me to think about what stories are worth telling right now. I think it’s important we elevate stories and perspectives from people who are on the frontlines of the current culture war. I am very concerned for my trans and non-binary friends, slightly less concerned for myself.

I’ve heard that from other people too. There are a million stories, which ones do I need to dedicate my time to?

I’m very obsessed with queer solidarity and reinforcing the bonds across the LGBTQ+ community, because I think people try to divide us. I encountered those efforts in the book banning piece I did. Conservatives were trying to rally gay people to join their fight. So I think there are a lot of important stories in that space that I could tell. It’s really important to me in this current moment that we elevate the stories and voices of the most vulnerable members of our community.