Art(s) on the Air Jun 7, 2023 with Ariel Felton

Join Tamara for an interview with Ariel Felton, a writer and editor with a decade of experience in feature writing, travel writing, and copywriting. She first arrived in Savannah in 2013, to pursue her MFA in Writing from SCAD. 

Post-graduation, she held writing jobs with SCAD and then taught creative writing for local non-profit Deep Center. Her writing has since been published in The New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker (Shouts & Murmurs), The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Bitter Southerner, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Scalawag Magazine, and more. Her essay “A Letter to My Niece,” first published in The Progressive, was listed as Notable in “Best American Essays 2020.”

Check out Ariel's work and follow her here:

https://arielfelton.com/writing
https://www.instagram.com/ar.felton/
https://twitter.com/Ariel_R_Felton 

Topics in their chat include:

When Ariel began her MFA program there were only 2 other new Writing students; the aspiration to become a David Sedaris-type writer of personal essays; keeping her own creative writing going while she worked as a creative writing teacher for middle- and high-schoolers at Deep Center; her observation that today's young generation cares about anti-bullying and how the internet has handed them terminology that helps them not internalize the various -isms they experience; showing her piece "A Letter to My Niece," a response to James Baldwin's "A Letter to My Nephew," to her parents and sister before it was published; her love for Twitter and using it to find publications' pitch calls; how writing travel blurbs for Atlas Obscura led to a door opening with a Washington Post editor; how she formats her email pitches to editors; how she pitched to the editor at the New Yorker for a year before getting an assignment; branded content is the "cheat code" for a writer to pay the bills; and how she's currently throwing herself into an upcoming book project.