By Julia Swanson-Hines, English and Creative Writing major
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| Julia Swanson-Hines (center), along with Emily Wirtz (left) and Amanda Wise (right) |
Most people think of publishing as simply just the process of getting a manuscript from screen to a book in print, but there’s much more to it, especially when it’s a journal such as River Teeth (www.riverteethjournal.com) or a publishing establishment such as the Ashland Poetry Press (www.ashlandpoetrypress.com). There are the smaller, but just as important pieces to the puzzle, without which the whole picture is lost.
One of the more surprising things when I first started working at my internship was the process of subscriptions. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that, of course, someone would have to manually enter each subscription into a database that then forms a list of who will receive the upcoming issue of River Teeth. There’s the check requests, deposit forms, refiling cabinets, shredding paper, sending out mail, and preparing the large shipments of River Teeth once the issue is ready to be sent out, which involves taking one of the shrink-wrapped books and sticking on a label with an address. Rinse and repeat one hundred times, making sure to keep the books in numerical order by zip code.
For the Ashland Poetry Press, there’s also the printing of hundreds of pages of manuscripts, sifting through lists of submitters’ materials, and its own personal mail account, as well as a current job I’m working on of entering this year’s book contest winner, Michael Miller, in national contests in the hopes of garnering him some awards for his worthy piece, Asking the Names, published by the Ashland Poetry Press.
While that may sound unappealingly menial, I love it. I love being able to contribute to the smaller things that keep the machine whirring but that most people forget about.
As I went through my months working with Cassy Brown, Managing Editor of River Teeth and the Ashland Poetry Press, she eventually could give me more thoughtful work, such as contributing to the River Teeth website in the form of formatting a certain type of post that is popular on the website: the “Beautiful Things” column (www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/beautiful-things). People submit a work under 250 words—so it’s a piece of flash fiction geared towards something they construe as beautiful in some way. It’s a fantastic way at getting a look at what all types of people—not just authors—think, experience, and write.
Being more interested in the copy-editing/proofreading side of publishing, I luckily have been given opportunities by Cassy to proofread many different types of things—from newsletters to article posts.
Again, while my internship may not sound particularly glamorous, it’s composed of working on separate tasks that maintain the foundation of River Teeth and the Ashland Poetry Press alike. Because I’m able to contribute in seemingly small ways while also learning so much surrounding different aspects of the publishing world, I couldn’t possibly ask for a better internship.
