Pitch Guidelines for MENT
MENT Magazine publishes critical and creative work that engages with Korean media forms through a variety of cultural, social, and political perspectives.
Please email pitches and inquiries to editors@mentmagazine.com
If you are pitching a critical essay, please make sure your pitch gives us a sense of the elements listed below. Your description of these items can be provisional, but we ask that you at least consider each of them in your pitch.
We have provided concrete examples of these elements from essays published in our first issue. Since the pitch is only the initial stage of the editorial process, your articulation of these elements does not need to be as concrete as the examples below. If your pitch is accepted, we will work with you to refine and develop these elements.
Please note that we have a pretty extensive editorial process. You should expect your piece to go through at least two stages of developmental revision (where we work with you to expand or refine the argument and, if needed, revise how key ideas are organized) before we head into copyediting.
Full first drafts, if you already have them, are welcomed and even encouraged! If you are pitching us with a full draft, please also include a pitch that covers the elements below so we have an overview of the argument. |
A published MENT essay example: In making emotion legible through the means of popular moving-image narrative, K-dramas function like the love alarm technology in Love Alarm, mediating feelings of attraction between individuals while publicizing and radiating these feelings out to viewers, soliciting them to feel sympathetically. In this sense, Love Alarm can be read reflexively to provide insight into its own aesthetics. |
Why a public audience who may not be precisely invested in the media object you are analyzing should care
A published MENT essay example: Reading Korean music and performance through the lens of Korean indigenous folk practices is a way of resisting colonial and Orientalist narratives around representations of queerness within Korean media culture. |
What has been said about your subject? What are you adding to the conversation?
An example from a past pitch that led to this published MENT essay: Both academic and public-facing writing have highlighted Korean American literature's fraught relationship to Koreanness. Little has been said about the reverse: Korea looking back at Korean Americanness. |
Why this piece at this particular moment? What recent events give rise to it? How might it in turn shed light on contemporary issues / phenomena?
An example from a past pitch that led to this published MENT essay: My essay would explore a very recent phenomenon within Korean American literary production, in which texts that gain American recognition spark responses from mainstream Korean cultural outlets. On a Weverse live chat earlier this summer, BTS's Jungkook gave a shout-out to Michelle Zauner's memoir Crying in H Mart. In 2021, Min Jin Lee and her son sat behind BTS on the roof of the Met. On Twitter, Lee praised the boy-band members as "exceptionally talented, handsome, and a global phenomenon,” and also possessed of “very good posture." Korean media outlets have likewise publicized Lee's work to Korean audiences, as a recently-released KBS documentary demonstrates. |
Pitches are typically between 300 - 500 words, but feel free to address the above points as needed.
To pitch experimental or multimodal contributions, proposals should include the following elements: