Ah, the all important query letter!
Here is a link to class Annie taught on query letters for our writing camp attendees—watch for a quick overview of how query letters work and how to think about them.
The class uses her own query letter below:
Annie’s Query Letter for current agent Katie Grimm (Don Congdon)
Dear Katie Grimm,
I'm writing to you looking for an agent to represent my 78,700-word novel, RABBIT CAKE, a darkly comic coming-of-age novel. RABBIT CAKE is set in contemporary rural New Hampshire, and is narrated by ten-year-old Elvis Babbitt, a very precocious girl obsessed with animals. The book is most similar to Patty Dann’s book Mermaids, as it is a quirky but realist story about a family.
The book begins as the Babbitt family copes with the strange and tragic death of the mother, who recently drowned while sleepwalking. Elvis’s older sister, Lizzie, is a sleepwalker as well, with tendencies towards nighttime violence. When their father sends Lizzie away to a mental hospital for her sleepwalking fits, Elvis finds solace at the zoo where she volunteers. Lizzie is released from the hospital three months later, her wild spirit seeming broken. With Lizzie on the couch all day, Elvis tries on the “bad sister” role, until the day Lizzie reawakens, emerging badder than ever. The novel ends two years after the mother’s death, when Elvis is twelve. It is a novel that plays with the concept of a “normal grieving period” after
a major loss.
A little about me: I’m currently the 2013-2014 Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library, which is a fellowship I was selected for based on a blind judging of the Rabbit Cake manuscript. The manuscript was also a finalist for McSweeney’s Amanda Davis 2012 Novel-in-Progress award and I think the book has gotten much stronger since then. I have an MFA from the University of Alabama, as well as an MA from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and a BA from Hamilton College. I have had twenty short stories published in literary magazines, and an excerpt from Rabbit Cake will be in this
winter’s Indiana Review (IR has also nominated that story for a Pushcart).
The first five pages are pasted below, which takes you to the end of chapter one. I can send the entire manuscript if you think that Rabbit Cake might be of interest to you. Thank you so much for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.
All best,
Annie Hartnett
annie.hartnett@gmail.com
Tessa’s Query Letter for current agent Ellen Levine (Trident)
Hello Ellen,
I’m seeking representation for my nonfiction narrative A Mouth Full of Fire: Inside the Last Circus Sideshow. Molly Giles has raved about you for years and suggested I get in touch. Per her recommendation, I've attached my proposal, which includes sample chapters, to this query.
A Mouth Full of Fire recounts the 2013 season I spent as a performer in the last American traveling sideshow, the World of Wonders. In the tradition of many old-timers, my circus career began with a lie. “Experienced snake charmer,” I wrote in an email to the boss, having no idea that a few months later I’d have to wear sunglasses on stage to hide the tears streaming down my face. We had sword swallowers and knife throwers, a headless woman and fire eater. In those same performers we had meth-heads and philosophers, lovers and juggalos. For six months, we lived in the back of a semi-truck, locked inside the carnival fairgrounds night after night with hundreds of other carnies.
Like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, I was fleeing catastrophe. I ran away with the circus, hiding on America’s seedy fairground stages to escape an insurmountable grief. Three years before I left for the sideshow, my mom had a series of strokes and subsequent brain surgeries that left her unable to walk or communicate. Instead of resigning the short life she had left to acute care and blood work, my parents got on a ship bound for Europe. Nobody thought they’d return. She was, I thoroughly believed, my only ally. A Mouth Full of Fire tells the story of how I had to learn to let go of the one person I didn’t think I could and welcome back the world. Day after day I woke up inside a sideshow, a girl with a wreck for a heart who had no idea, would never have guessed, that in our big red and blue tent there would be a place for freaks like us to try again.
Excerpts from A Mouth Full of Fire have appeared on the literary website The Rumpus, home of Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar column, featured in the Best of the Rumpus, and reprinted on Sideshow Spectrum and Sideshow World’s webpages. Other work can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, [Pank], Seneca Review, and more. I am currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Utah, hold an MFA from the University of Alabama, and have won awards in nonfiction, fiction and poetry.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing back from you.
Sincerely,
Tessa Fontaine
tgfontaine@gmail.com
805.680.2605