A few months ago, my agent, the wonderful Mickey Mikkelson, asked me if I was interested in writing a piece for Uncaged magazine. “It’s pretty wide open,” he said, “so, you can write about whatever you want.” 

That’s not an exact quote, but it’s fairly accurate.

I did a little checking into Uncaged. The first site I found was dedicated to MMA and I quickly discarded that. A magazine devoted to people who could snap me in half was probably not what Mickey had arranged. Next on the list of results was Uncaged Magazine, an ezine that caters to people in their 20s to 40s (my estimation) and Egyptian Americans (again my take from reading through their site). About half of the articles are in Arabic, the rest are in English.

Well, I thought, that’s different, but Mickey casts a wide net. Some events are great, like yesterday’s interview with Bonnie D. Graham on VoiceAmerica (more on that in a future post), and some are less great, like the podcast hosted by a 17-year-old who ate potato chips during the interview and griped about her younger brother. This, I decided, was an opportunity to expand my market.

Since the magazine listed physical health, mental health, and student life among its categories, I decided to write a piece on Intentional Blindness – the tendency of people to choose not to see things they don’t like, don’t want to know, don’t agree with, etc. I wrote the article and sent it to Mickey.

Months passed. 

This amazing Baobab tree was in our camp

When I got back from my trip to Africa, I decided to check on things I had submitted. So, I went to uncagedmag.com. Nothing. Maybe they didn’t like it, I decided, and pinged Mickey.

He assured me that they had liked it and were going to publish the article. A couple days later, he sent me the link. It was for a different magazine: Uncaged Book Reviews. Oh, hey! There I am, right on the cover.

Well, that would have made complete sense. I searched for Uncaged Magazine again, and there it was, number 3 on the list. I had fallen prey to Attentional Blindness – the tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of other, perhaps more important, cues. I missed the gorilla.

In any case, they published the article.  It’s a little ironic that I suffered from one of the cognitive dysfunctions that my article discussed. 

Here’s a link to the article. It’s on Page 130 if that link doesn’t work. I’ll repost it here with some bonus content – more than just additional pictures this time – within the next couple of weeks.

Now, I wonder what I would have written if I’d researched the correct magazine.