This spring, New England Review is partnering with our friends at AGNI, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review to bring you the New England LitBundle 2021. Get all four journals for just $83 for the whole year, from now through noon on May 3 EST! Order here.
Thomas Kivney ’13 talks to NER intern Rachel Horowitz-Benoit ’21 about his work at a literary scouting agency and getting his MFA in screenwriting.
Rachel Horowitz-Benoit: When were you an intern at NER and what was a highlight (or anything you remember doing) of your experience?
Thomas Kivney: I interned at NER over winter term 2013 and it was a wonderful experience that I’m so thankful to have had. The people there were all an incredible mix of hyper intelligent and super welcoming and I remember the office having this warm, almost magical atmosphere—full of old NER volumes, lots of comfortable places to read, and there always seemed to be snow outside. I really looked forward to going into work every day. I especially loved the Friday meetings where we got to discuss some pieces that had been submitted to the journal and give our input. It was an informative peek into the editorial workings of the journal that taught me a lot about how to articulate and defend my opinions about what makes a story work.
RHB: What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you today in your professional work?
TK: Middlebury and NER really taught me how to think critically about narrative while also opening my eyes to a wider world of stories out there. I like to think that I’m a more adventurous and more reflective reader and storyteller because of my time at Midd.
Thomas Kivney at Middlebury, where he double majored in English and film
RHB: Where are you now, geographically and professionally, and what were some of the steps in between?
TK: I’m in Los Angeles getting my MFA in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute Conservatory. Before that I spent six years in New York working in publishing. I started off at Macmillan in the audiobook department, which was just a fantastic crash course in the industry as a whole because it meant working with tons of people across multiple imprints and genres—literary, thriller, romance, sci-fi, YA, you name it. For anyone looking to get their start in publishing I can’t recommend audiobooks enough. From there, I transitioned over to a literary scouting agency for four years, which is where I started becoming more involved in film. It was a rewarding experience that meant getting to work closely alongside Warner Bros and Netflix, advising them on the acquisition of books for adaptation to TV and film.
RHB: What is the focus of your Master’s, and why did you decide to pursue this field?
TK: I’m getting my Master’s in Screenwriting. I’m just a massive movie nerd through and through.
RHB: What do you read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately?
TK: Working at a scouting agency meant reading two or three books a week for work, and much of this past year has been about slowly rediscovering the love of reading for its own sake. I recently really enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which was a great little puzzlebox of a book. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jason Lutes’s epic but very entertaining three-part graphic novel Berlin was a behemoth I happily devoured while stuck inside this summer. And a little less recent—but the best thing I’ve read in years—remains Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. They’re just fantastic and the HBO adaptation is really good too.
RHB: Thanks for your time, Thomas, and the best of luck with your degree!
Spring continues to be a busy season for NER authors — particularly our poets! Kerrin McCadden released American Wake (Black Sparrow Press), a book of poetry that explores the author’s Irish identity as well as “family, death and grief, apologies, and all manner of departures.” McCadden’s poem, “The Magpie: A Key” was published in NER 40.3.
Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for her book Four-Legged Girl, recently published frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press). This candid collection of sonnets chronicles “a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again.” Seuss’s poem “Memento Mori” was featured in NER 36.4.
Fady Joudah’s latest release, Tethered to Stars: Poems (Milkweed Editions), “inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire.” Joudah’s poetry has appeared in NER 38.4.
Cortney Lamar Charleston, published in NER 37.2, released his much anticipated second volume of poetry, Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books). The collection “examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.”
You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.
Former NER intern and current literary agent Alison Lewis ’14 talks to intern Rachel Horowitz-Benoit ’21 about her career, Middlebury, and new books she’s excited about.
Rachel Horowitz-Benoit: When were you an intern at NER and what was a highlight (or anything you remember doing) of your experience?
Alison Lewis: The highlight was always discussing fiction submissions—trying out my own very nascent editorial opinions, and hearing Carolyn Kuebler’s shockingly wise and perceptive insights. There were two stories we read from the general submissions pile during my time at NER that ended up getting published, and I remember the awe of feeling each of those stories open up for me as Carolyn talked about them.
Also an unexpectedly memorable highlight: during that time NER moved offices, and I got to help then Editor Stephen Donadio pack up his mountains of books. There was an unbelievable number of them, filling deep shelves and stacked up on every flat surface. That was awe-inducing too, just touching all those books.
RHB: What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you today in your professional work?
AL: Learning how to form and organize an argument. It came to me very slowly and painstakingly, over many late nights in the library (and the library cafe after the library would close for the night!), writing and rewriting essays for class. Also through working with first-year students on their essays as a writing tutor. I’m so grateful for all that. Now it feels very possible to help an author move the pieces of something they’ve written around until they make sense, to cut what feels vague or distracting, to clarify what they’re trying to say, and then (thrillingly!) watch the whole come into view.
Alison Lewis (in the middle) and friends during her time at Middlebury, where she majored in English and American Literature.
RHB: How did you come to your current job as a literary agent? What is your day-to-day like at the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency?
AL: I’ve been working in book publishing since graduating from Midd, first as an intern and then an assistant at the publisher W.W. Norton, then as an assistant at ZPA, and working my way up to agenting on my own, through sheer persistence! My day-to-day now is a mix of very “business-y” work—e-mails and contracts and negotiations—and long phone conversations with authors about their ideas and careers, lots of reading and editing, and talking with editors about books.
RHB: How much time do you find to read for pleasure outside of the reading necessary for your work? Have you read anything good lately?
AL: I try to always be reading for pleasure, however slowly, around all the work reading. It makes life feel worthwhile! And it also is always opening up new (or new to me) ways in which books can work on readers—structurally or line by line or in their vantage point on the subject or whatever. That fills me with hope and possibility too. I’m in the middle of Sanam Maher’s recent account of modern Pakistan, inflected through the honor killing of the social media star Qandeel Baloch, which is intimately reported on the ground, in the aftermath—it’s called A Woman Like Her. I also can’t stop talking about the Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles, a completely delightful short novel about two nearly devastating marriages, and about the software engineer and brilliant essayist Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code, on the 1990s and early 2000s in Silicon Valley. She saw it all coming, and warned us!
RHB: Is there a current or past project you are particularly excited about?
I’m really excited about the journalist Julia Cooke’s narrative history Come Fly the World, which published this March, and follows the lives of several Jet Age Pan Am stewardesses (as they then called themselves), who took the job for a chance to “see the world” and perhaps have a career of some consequence—a rare opportunity for women at the time—and ended up actively involved in history on the global stage, as airlines inserted themselves into international conflicts, most significantly the Vietnam War, and as stewardess unions fought for rights and dignity ahead of second-wave feminism and in concert with the Civil Rights movement.
And then coming out in August is the scholar Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze, examining the work of a remarkable emerging cohort of Black artists (Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Khalil Joseph, Dawoud Bey, Okwui Okpakwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson) who are actively dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see, and see Blackness in particular, anew. It’s such a powerful and important work of theory—I think it really gives us tools to reckon with this nation’s present and historic assault on Black lives—but also Tina is such a sensitive, poetic (and often very funny!) writer and observer of art, that it’s just a pure pleasure to spend time with her words.
RHB: Thank you for your time, Alison, and best of luck at your agency!