My Girl's In Print! By MichaelPAGO PAGO, AMERICAN SAMOA

For what it's worth, this is one
of my favorite Cruising World
covers ever.

My girls enjoy a comparatively large amount of free time and eagerly spend every minute of that time reading, writing, or drawing. Half of Del Viento’s 28,000-pound laden weight is from notebooks they’ve filled or will soon fill—it’s easier to pull teeth than to cull.

Eager to see her work published, Eleanor submitted some of her poems to Highlights magazine a couple years back. It was her first lesson in rejection (though kudos to the Highlights editor for a thoughtful, personalized response). More recently, she pitched a biographical, feature-length story to a girls’ magazine she likes, New Moon Girls. The editor loved Eleanor’s story and plans to run it later this year. Then, this spring, I saw Eleanor reading a book she got for Christmas.

“You know, that’s a sailing book and Cruising World magazine sometimes uses freelance writers to write book reviews. When you’re done reading, you ought to pitch a review to them…they pay money.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, you’ve got to convince them to buy it first and then they’ll make you an offer.”

I got the ball rolling, but Eleanor ran with it. She wrote a succinct, professional pitch for a book review and emailed it to Cruising World. We all waited eagerly for a response. It was less than a week before Eleanor casually mentioned she’d heard back from a Cruising World editor.

“Awesome, what did they say?”

“They want to buy my review and they’re gonna pay me $40.” She beamed.

Well, we are always way behind in getting our physical mail forwarded to us, but we just arrived in American Samoa and waiting for us at the post office was the May 2016 issue of Cruising World and on page 20, there is Eleanor Robertson’s review of Melanie Neale’s Boat Kid: How I survived swimming with sharks, being homeschooled, and growing up on a sailboat.

That’s my girl.

--MR