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NER Interns: Where are they now?

Elana Schrager

February 25, 2021

Elana Schrager ’17 talks to Maia Sauer ’22 about her path from NER intern to campaign manager.

Elana (right) during a recent campaign.

Maia Sauer: When did you intern at NER and what were some memorable aspects of your experience?

Elana Schrager: I interned with NER in the summer of 2016, between my junior and senior years. I had just arrived back in the US from my semester abroad in Dublin and was grateful to spend a whole summer in Vermont.

Interning with NER gave me the opportunity to think about writing, and short fiction in particular, in ways I hadn’t had time before. Reading from the general submission pile every week was different from reading the literature of the classroom. I was able to peer into the process of writing and the labor that goes into shaping stories, as they become greater than themselves when read.

Outside the work itself, I most enjoyed getting to meet and work with Carolyn, Marcy, and my co-intern, Natalie. As interns, we got invited to be part of their little on-campus haven, and it was a pleasure to get to know them and learn from them. 

Elana (left) during her time at Middlebury College.

MS: Your career path has gone in a political direction, if I’m not mistaken. How did you arrive where you are today, geographically and professionally?

ES: That’s a story without much of a defined narrative thread, but I’ll give it my best shot. When I was at NER, I remember talking with Marcy about maybe wanting to go work for a lit mag after graduation, and then maybe going on to grad school.

I led backpacking trips the summer after I graduated and drove around the country. When September came, I started driving east and applying to jobs—I wanted to write. While en-route from Sacramento to Maryland, I got a communications and research internship with End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform group. It turns out that political communications and research is very different from the academic writing and research I’d loved at school, but my internship ended the winter before the 2018 midterms, campaigns were hiring, and I wanted to leave DC. So, I decided to look for a campaign job.

While I was visiting Midd for Feb graduation, I got an email about a finance and communications job on a congressional race in Southern Illinois, and I moved out there nine days later. After it ended, I decided that I wanted to manage a campaign, which I’ve now done twice, in Virginia and Minnesota, moving to a new city every year for a new race.

MS: What was a skill that you developed during your undergraduate years that has been beneficial to your current work?

ES: I couldn’t have dreamed up a job more different from the work I did in school. Still, there are so many skills I learned there that I use every day. School rewarded me for being detail oriented and able to produce work efficiently and without error—both of which are important for managing campaigns. But the skill I truly learned at school, and the skill that’s the most valuable to me now, is how to build and maintain relationships. I learned how to talk with professors as people, not just authority figures, and built friendships with classmates that have lasted for years. That simple skill has helped me as I’ve worked with different people all over the country.

Also, learning Photoshop by messing around with it in the Axinn basement is always worthwhile.

MS: I could imagine that working within our current political climate is, at times, incredibly frustrating. How do you stay motivated, inspired, and committed?

ES: Working in electoral politics—and House politics in particular, which is where I’ve spent most of my time—is very humbling. Each campaign takes millions of dollars, massive amounts of resources and effort, and when it’s done, the chess board is reset and it’s done all again. It’s also easy to get burned out, because campaigns demand your all. You’re playing a kind of zero sum game: you win or you lose. It’s the worst thing in the world to be on the losing side on election day, wondering if you could have given just a little bit more, and whether that little bit more could have gotten you over the finish line. It’s also, critically, not a game—the people we elect result in policies that affect the lives of millions of people.

So, I try to pay attention and give importance to the tiniest things that I tend to overlook: drinking a whole cup of coffee on a bright morning without receiving an email or a phone call; going for a walk with a friend; reading a long-form article or a book. There are moments when I can’t see the delight and importance of those small things, and that’s when I know I need to take a breath and get some sleep.

MS: What have you been reading recently? Do you find yourself gravitating toward certain genres or themes right now?

ES: Last year, I basically read Twitter, newsletters, article headlines, and ad copy. In the weeks since election day, I’ve tried to ease myself back into more pleasurable reading. I started by rereading old young adult novels while I was at my parents’ house for the holidays, letting myself slip back into stories that required no thought or effort on my part. Now, I’m gravitating toward gentle books outside of the here and now, and the struggles of today and tomorrow. I’m currently reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. I let it pour over me as I take a breath and figure out what my next year will be, and what job I’ll decide to do next. 

MS: Thanks very much for your time, Elana. It was wonderful to connect with you.

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes Tagged With: Elana Schrager, Maia Sauer

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Alicia Wright

February 19, 2021

Will Koch ’21 talks with former NER intern Alicia Wright ‘11.5 about her pursuit of a doctorate, her experience as an editor, and how NER has shaped her career pursuits.

Alicia Wright on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia

Will Koch: Where are you now, geographically and professionally?

Alicia Wright: At present, I’m tucked away in an old stone house overlooking a small swamp and the Etowah River in northwest Georgia, where I’m from, in retreat from the Colorado winter. I’m happy to be surrounded by birds, ferns, and trees, to take my dog out canoeing. Because I’m working on my dissertation for my PhD, and because I have the good fortune to be able edit Denver Quarterly remotely, I’ve been able to come back to the place I focus on most in my scholarly and creative work. To that end, I’m finishing one poetry manuscript, in the midst of a new one, honing my critical reviewing skills, reading submissions for Annulet, the literary poetics journal I’ve just started, and applying for jobs, as I’ll be finishing my degree in the summer. It’s a good thing I like my several hats.

WK: That’s a great lead in to my next question! You’re currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. What has that experience been like for you? Did you know you were going to pursue this path while you were a Middlebury undergraduate?

AW: Working on a PhD has been precisely what it may seem like: challenging, invigorating in a kind of crazed way, sometimes daunting, and so rewarding. The faculty have been incredible to work with, and it’s such a seismic experience to simultaneously develop your creative and critical thought in conjunction with each other. My program in particular is geared towards creative writers, so there’s been a great deal of flexibility afforded to my studies: I focused on women makers and writers of Black Mountain College (I cited Lisa Mullenneaux’s essay in NER 36.4, “Hilda Morley: Lost on Black Mountain”), the ecopoetics of the US South, and narrative theory for my comprehensive exams. My dissertation is a collection of poetry, and an accompanying critical essay on southeastern ecopoetry and lyric theory that’ll eventually become a monograph (that’s the hope, anyway).

Truth be told: as an undergraduate, I never thought I’d go down this path. I loved creative writing (I took every possible course the department offered), knew that I wanted to somehow be involved with publishing, and spent many long, weird hours in the library basement working through the poetry section. Even though I received truly kind attention from Middlebury faculty, I wasn’t convinced I was “smart enough” to be an academic of any kind. In many ways, I was just squeaking by in my classes—although, I remember, I did split up my thesis into a small poetry collection and a thesis essay, prefiguring my work now, funnily enough. After a foray into the New York publishing world, I realized what sustained me were things like taking poetry classes, going to readings, lurking in bookshops, and volunteering at places like Ugly Duckling Presse. The more I stayed with poetry, especially during my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I began to realize that poetry was teaching me how to think through and with it, and that what I thought in it and about it might actually be good. I’ve kept an editorial perspective on all my work, which I suspect has been a useful metric for how I want to position availability of meaning and feeling in my writing.

WK: It’s interesting that you mention an editorial perspective influencing your work. Were there any skills you developed at NER that you’ve applied to your pursuit of a PhD?

AW: One important skill, among many, that I picked up during my internship was more a habit of mind: I learned that I could be interested in archival material and literary criticism, that there’s a fortuitousness and felicity to research and varied approaches to the essay, and to see that the transhistorical and cross-disciplinary pieces published in the journal’s different discursive sections complement and complicate each other in a way that makes those connections themselves sparkle. The arrangement captures an intellectual feeling. Perhaps most importantly, that part of the work of editing a literary journal is the work of nurturing and following an active appetite for different modes of writing. That literary disposition I absorbed there has steered me ever since.

WK: How did your time with NER and literary magazines at Middlebury prepare you for your position as Associate Editor for Denver Quarterly? Are there any notable similarities or differences that you can discern between the two publications?

AW: I remember having to seek the blessing of the mastheads of Blackbird and Sweatervest [two Middlebury undergraduate publications] so that I could serve on both of them! There was such joy in poring over the submissions for each, particularly when I served as the editor of Sweatervest, with my friends and peers—seeing what came out of Middlebury’s creative world, reading the work out loud together. The efforts we put into making that issue of Sweatervest are not so different from my efforts now with Denver Quarterly—the masthead is similarly comprised of my friends and colleagues. In that sense, I understood then that collaborative work from the heart is what fuels literary magazine work. With New England Review, I learned about literary sociality and citizenship from its more professional standpoint. I’ve based my own editorial approach on these values and practices. One way to think of it is that a literary journal is ultimately an epistolary object: missives are sent from writers, passed between editors, editors write with good or disappointing news to submitters, edits and payments are likewise sent, future or back issues are mailed. The journal as a made object communicates its own messages between its pieces and to its readers, almost as if they’re letters that make their way to their reader as chance permits. 

One difference is that the Denver Quarterly masthead is populated mostly by doctoral students, who move through the masthead as they do their time in the program, so the nature of what kind of work has been published very much reflects a more mercurial and shifting, through related, taste. Denver Quarterly announces itself as being a journal of a kind of experimental bent—its editors are happy to publish pieces that have never met realism or conventional narrative before, or that operate in their own, sui generis universes, particularly in prose. The poetry it has published recently runs contemporary poetry’s aesthetic gamut, which is to say even formally-inflected poems attend to their material nature as much as poems styled “experimentally.” The grip’s a little tighter, and differently exploratory, in a New England Review poem. In terms of method, Denver Quarterly’s table of contents doesn’t distinguish its creative contributors by genre to complicate those distinctions, while New England Review publishes a wider range of texts and forms of criticism and names them as such. Though they may seem very different aesthetically, both journals are homes for rigor, particularly for critical work.

WK: What was your most memorable experience with NER? Are there any pieces or moments that you remember particularly well?

AW: My interview with Carolyn was particularly formative: it was the first time I’d been regarded in a literary-professional way, and was likely the first nonacademic conversation about literature and editing with a professional that I’d ever had. I was practically shaking when I was assigned to copyedit Frank M. Meola’s “Emerson Between Faith and Doubt” (32.3), and I am certain that I had many neurotic queries. In that issue, I also was introduced to Isabella Bird [Bishop]’s writing through proofreading Stephen Donadio’s selection from her one of her travel narratives, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, which is still out of print (though I’ve since tracked down a copy). My love of writers’ diaries and letters, alongside her work, began then. I remember fondly being pretty impressed by a cover letter in which the writer said they couldn’t with regularity be reached by mail, as they lived on a houseboat.

WK: What do you read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately? Do you ever have time to read for pleasure?

AW: Right now, for me pleasure in reading comes simultaneously with reading as work. I’m always reading to be impressed, for immersion, to enter into a kind of co-constitutive meditation with a text. But for nonliterary pleasure? I read clothing, or fashion magazines. I’ll confess to some European interior design magazines too, while I’m at it. I still have yet to truly fall back into novels since I worked in publishing—right now I read them pretty sparingly. The last novel I read for a kind of edgy fun was Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet, Or, The Origin of the World. Books I like that I’ve read recently are Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, Juana I by Ana Arzoumanian, translated by Gabriel Amor, Emporium by Aditi Machado, and Time Being by Oni Buchanan. I’m also revisiting Pliny the Elder, who is so great. With regard to time, no, and yet one absolutely has to read for pleasure, if you want to keep reading at all. Pleasure reading only becomes more and more specific, though what’s pleasureful mercifully continues to surprise me.

WK: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some of my questions, Alicia. Best of luck to you as you finish your PhD!

Alicia Wright during her time at Middlebury

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes Tagged With: Alicia Wright, Will Koch

NER Award for Emerging Writers 2021

Announcing the Finalists

February 16, 2021

It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the seventh annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. 

Su Cho (41.1)
Justin Danzy (41.3)
Lydia Paar (41.4)
Kate Petersen (41.3)
Laura Schmitt (41.2)
Samyak Shertok (41.4)

This award provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference—the exact details of which are still to be determined for 2021—and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in March.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2020.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Justin Danzy, Kate Petersen, Laura Schmitt, Lydia Paar, Samyak Shertok, Su Cho

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Cedar Attanasio

February 12, 2021

Cedar Attanasio while at Middlebury (left) and currently (right)

NER winter intern Regina Fontanelli ’22 talks to Cedar Attanasio ’11.5, former NER intern and current Associated Press reporter, about becoming a reporter and his advice for budding journalists.


Regina Fontanelli: Tell us briefly, where are you now, both geographically and professionally?

Cedar Attanasio: I cover education for the Associated Press out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a hybrid role in two ways. It’s a local reporting job where we try to find news our readers can use in the state. It’s also a national reporting job where we look for ways that the Southwest is informing conversations on education and poverty across the country. It’s a text-focused position, but I’ve carved out a place for still photography and video journalism in the role as well.

RF: What was your road to becoming a reporter at AP? Have you always wanted to be a journalist?

CA: I couldn’t get a journalism job straight out of Middlebury so I focused on the skills that set me apart from my competition. I learned photography (from friends) and Portuguese (at MLS), flew myself to Brazil on a credit card in 2014, and got my first bylines freelancing coverage of the soccer World Cup.

RF: I’ve noticed you’ve worked for a few different publications in the past and reported on a variety of stories. Is there anything you’ve learned that you would want to share with budding journalists?

CA: Unless you are so incredibly talented that your favorite job opportunities are dropping in your lap, don’t be afraid to write at a level that is below your tastes and not perfectly aligned with your values. Ghost writing. Blogging. All writing is good experience. Paid writing with an audience is better experience. 

The same is true editorially. I wrote for left-leaning and right-leaning news organizations. It helped me find my true calling, which is the AP’s culture of advancing the power of facts. If that sounds boring or cliche to you it’s okay—many partisans or activists of all political stripes are contributing to the national conversation in their own way.

RF: How long does it take you to research for a piece and what is your writing process like?

CA: My enterprise stories take between four days and four months to execute. There are always a few in the pipeline and some fall through. My writing process is a painful mess that starts with pages of notes distilled into graphs and broken up by diversions: walks, video games, etc. One of the most important parts of my writing process is to figure out what images will complement a story. Multimedia is central to my process, and iterates into the color and quotes that end up in the text.

RF: Do you feel like going to Middlebury has contributed to who you are as a writer?

CA: I came to Middlebury wanting to become a geography professor. The appreciation for data, mapping, and migration I gained there inform my work every day. By my super-senior semester I had found another calling. I studied with now-retired professor Chris Shaw, worked at the Middlebury Campus, and read Ted Connover’s work. I abandoned my geography thesis to do an internship at National Geographic. Interning at the New England Review was an extension of that and allowed me to deepen my interest in storytelling, the art of the pitch, and the reality of the slush pile.

RF: Thank you so much for your time and wisdom, Cedar!

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes Tagged With: Cedar Attanasio, Regina Fontanelli

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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