New England Review

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Vedika Khanna

Current NER summer intern Simone Edgar Holmes ’20.5 talks to Vedika Khanna ’14, former NER intern and current assistant editor for HarperCollins Publishers, about the publishing industry and some exciting upcoming books.

Simone Edgar Holmes: When were you an intern at NER and what was the highlight of your experience?

Vedika Khanna: I was a fall intern at NER in 2010. Reading submissions and discussing them with Carolyn [Kuebler] was by far the highlight. That was the first time I analyzed and assessed writing with the question of whether it ought to be published, which was very different from what I was doing in my creative writing classes at Middlebury. My current approach to considering submissions is built off what I learned from Carolyn during my internship.

SEH: That’s wonderful to hear! You now work as an Assistant Editor for HarperCollins Publishers in New York City––sounds like a dream job! What were some steps you took to get to where you are now?

VK: I did a lot of informational interviews, some through the Middlebury network, when I first got to NYC. They gave me a basic understanding of how the publishing industry works. I then interned at the Writers House literary agency, where I honed my skills, gained a more in-depth view of publishing, and got clarity on how I wanted to be a part of it. After that, I applied to jobs and was eventually hired as an Editorial Assistant at HarperCollins. Summarizing it like this makes it sound easy, but it actually took almost three years to land my job after arriving in NYC.

SEH: Briefly, what does your day-to-day at HarperCollins look like? 

VK: I assist two editors, one who works on fiction and one who works on nonfiction. My day-to-day work largely involves shepherding their books through the publication process. This can include anything from working on contract requests to writing copy to creating jacket memos to prepping manuscripts for the production team, and more. I’m also trying to acquire books for my own list, so I’m consistently networking with literary agents, reading submissions, and working on the same tasks mentioned earlier for my own titles.

SEH: It’s great to get a sense of what your job entails. What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you in you today in your professional work? 

VK: Working as a peer writing tutor at Middlebury completely shaped the way in which I edit books. The big picture, questions-based approach to editing students’ essays transfers seamlessly to book editing, as do the interpersonal skills involved in working with people on their writing one-on-one.

SEH: I’m also a peer writing tutor, and have noticed a similar transfer of skills to submissions reading for NER. Does reading for your job making reading for pleasure any less appealing? If not, have you read any good books lately?

VK: I would say reading for pleasure has become more difficult since I started working in publishing, but not less appealing. It’s rejuvenating to get lost in books but finding time to read for fun amidst all the other reading I have to do is tricky. I make as much time for it as I can.

Recently I’ve really enjoyed Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, Good Talk by Mira Jacob, and Circe by Madeline Miller. I also can’t help but recommend three amazing books coming out this fall: When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole, Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur, and Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth.

SEH: Thank you Vedika for speaking with me today! I’ve enjoyed Madeline Miller’s Circe myself, and look forward to reading your other recommendations once they’re out this fall.

New episode of NER Out Loud podcast

Listen to 4 UK poets

Episode 12 of the NER Out Loud podcast has been released! Created, edited, and hosted by summer intern Simone Edgar Holmes, this episode presents Shazea Quraishi, Seni Seneviratne, Naomi Foyle, and Sasha Dugdale reading their work from New England Review.

From her remote-work home in Charlotte, Vermont, Simone brings together the voices of NER authors from South London, Brighton, Derbyshire, and Sussex, UK.

Listen in as Shazea Quraishi reads “Elegy,” Seni Seneviratne reads “A Girl in the Woods,” Naomi Foyle reads “Made from Fibres Not Readily Penetrated,” and Sasha Dugdale reads “Chair No. 14.” All of these poems and more are available online as part of NER‘s recent feature of 15 contemporary British poets, edited by Marilyn Hacker.

You can stream the NER Out Loud podcast from our website or Soundcloud. Or download from iTunes and subscribe.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Jake Risinger

Current NER summer intern Simone Edgar Holmes ’20.5 talks to Jake Risinger ’06, former NER intern and current Assistant Professor of English, about teaching, listening, and Lord Byron.

Jake Risinger, pictured now (left) and during his time at Middlebury (right), ready to hit the slopes.

Simone Edgar Holmes: When were you an intern at NER and what do you remember from the experience?

Jake Risinger: I worked for NER in my last year at Middlebury, starting in the fall of 2005. My recollection is that the position was pretty nebulous at that point in time—not really something you applied for, but an experience I sought out. I’d just come back to campus from a year abroad at Oxford University, where there was a seemingly endless line-up of readings and literary lectures, and there were all kinds of journals and literary magazines ready for perusal on the shelves at Blackwell’s bookshop. It seemed like literary history was unfolding all around you all the time. Back in Vermont, the New England Review seemed like this comparable blast of literary and intellectual life always unfolding in a quiet corner of campus. NER was over in Kirk Alumni Center at that point in time, and I remember large piles of paper submissions in their manilla envelopes (and the wonderful assortment of stamps that came with them). There were quiet afternoons of copy editing and at one point Carolyn Kuebler gave me the enviable “job” of reading around in other journals in quest of new ideas for best practices. On one particularly memorable afternoon, we cleaned out NER’s self-storage locker at a place up on Route 7 North, a garage stuffed full of chapbooks, back issues, journals, and other literary odds and ends. I think I made out like a bandit…

SEH: You’re now an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University. What were some steps you took to get to where you are now?

JR: After Middlebury, I went back to the UK to get my master’s degree, and then I spent a year working at a bookshop in Virginia. Working at a bookstore had its own kind of melancholy—proximity to books without much time to read or talk about them. So I filled out grad school applications and started my PhD at Harvard the next fall. For most of those years, my partner Memory and I were “dorm parents,” living in a freshman dorm and looking after first-year students. We’d walk our dog around Cambridge and then come back to make late-night grilled cheese for thirty students. I suppose most of my post-college life has involved thinking and writing about literature, but also (crucially) engaging with students. I trace a lot of this habit of being back to Middlebury: when I’m teaching, I still think quite a bit about what it was like to be a student.   

SEH: I hope to be a professor (of art history) someday, so I’ll do my best to keep this advice in mind! My next question is about your area of expertise: Romanticism. What first sparked your interest in this literary movement?

JR: When I was in high school, I was blown away by hearing the last few lines of William Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode.” I couldn’t get them out of my head, but I didn’t come close to understanding their urgency or significance until I got to Middlebury. Bob Hill and John Elder introduced me to the wider world of Romantic literature, and I haven’t looked back. In Bob Hill’s class, he asked each of us to write down a real, legitimate question on a scrap of paper at the end of every class. He’d collect these, and start the next session by riffing on our scraps of questions. I still have loads of questions about this influential moment in literary history and I just keep asking them.

SEH: You teach some fascinating courses––“Ecopoetics: From the Enlightenment to the End of Nature,” “Before Night Falls: British Poetry, 1750–1900,” and “Lord Byron and His Circle” to name a few. Which one is your favorite to teach and why?

JR: When I pitched the idea of teaching a course on Lord Byron, I was worried that no one would sign up. Byron was world famous in his day, infamously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but he’s never been a staple of college syllabi. I’ve had the chance to teach this course a couple of times now, and it’s always a riot—certainly one of my favorites. For one thing, Byron was a comedic genius, skilled at the subtle art of throwing shade. His irony cuts down anyone who purports to know all of the answers, a move that puts any professor trying to explain Byron in an awkward, almost hypocritical position. All of this destabilization makes for great, open-ended discussion. Talking about Byron puts all kinds of topics on the table: the relationship between literature and history, the performance of gender, the rise of celebrity culture, or even what seemed like an almost impossible task: the desire to write an epic in a seemingly unheroic age. It’s hard to read Byron without finding traces of our own world everywhere.  

SEH: I wish I could take this course with you! What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate that most benefits you today in your professional work?

JR: In my field, we talk a lot about teaching students how to write. And at some universities you can still take a course in public speaking. But let me make a claim here for the value of listening. It’s one thing I loved about my best seminars at Middlebury—that point of absorption where you stop thinking about what you could say next and instead listen intently to what someone else is saying. This is so vital to teaching. When we are all really listening, we can start really talking. And that’s when real understanding becomes possible. Obviously our world is greatly in need of more careful listening.  

SEH: What is your favorite genre to read for pleasure? Have you read anything exceptional lately? 

JR: Since I spend a lot of time teaching poetry, I tend to gravitate towards novels for free range reading. At the moment, I’m engrossed by Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. Another recent favorite was Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance.  

SEH: Thank you so much Jake for sharing your experiences, recommendations, and words of wisdom.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Maddie Oatman

Current NER summer intern Simone Edgar Holmes ’20.5 talks to Maddie Oatman ’08, former NER intern and current Senior Editor at Mother Jones, about writing, podcasting, and book recommendations.

Maddie Oatman, pictured now (left) and during her time at Middlebury (right).

Simone Edgar Holmes: When were you an intern at NER and what was a highlight of your experience?

Maddie Oatman: I interned at NER in 2007. The highlight of working as an intern at NER was realizing that spending lots of time reading and thinking about stories—pretty much my favorite pastime—is actually something people get hired to do. I remember sitting in a small room with a couch in the NER office and going through a stack of submissions and feeling amazed that someone cared what I thought about them.

SEH: That’s certainly a great feeling I’m also experiencing this summer. If I’m not mistaken, you now work as a Senior Editor and Executive Producer at Mother Jones in San Francisco. What were some steps you took to get to where you are now?

MO: Being an avid reader and paying close attention to detail and the use of language has always benefited me in my path. When I first moved to San Francisco, I volunteered at literary events and wrote for the magazine the Rumpus, which gave me my first clips after college. This opened my eyes to what an editorial job was like day-to-day, and it also gave me the confidence boost I needed to apply to work at a national magazine like Mother Jones. I’ve been there for a decade now, through a couple of presidential administrations. One thing that’s helped keep me inspired and always learning is to seek out fellowships, conferences, and workshops that have allowed me to learn from writers and editors with a range of experiences across the country, in both nonfiction and fiction. The Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, for instance, led by Chris Shaw and Bill McKibben, helped kickstart my narrative feature writing; while the fellowship no longer exists, there are other journalism grants that give this type of funding and mentorship that can make a huge difference for writers, even if they also work at a publication or have clips under their belt. A few years later, I attended a Transom Audio Storytelling workshop in Big Sky, Montana, and that helped me get to where I could create and manage a podcast at Mother Jones. I also think some of the jobs I’ve had outside of journalism helped me as a writer: working in restaurants, for instance, opened my eyes to the class and race dynamics that fuel our society. I don’t think there’s a single job in existence that could not inform writing somehow; that said, most jobs in the world will take up the time you might rather be writing.

SEH: It’s great to hear how jobs that seem unrelated to writing can still come to bear on publishing work. I especially liked your restaurant example, an experience which I assume also supports your work as the co-host and manager of Bite, a Mother Jones food podcast. Do you have any podcasting advice for me, as this summer’s producer and host of NER Out Loud?

MO: I love how tactile audio is—though right now during the pandemic, it’s less so because we all have to stay away from each other. And I’m sure many an audio producer is being kept up at night by the thought of microphones as a potential source of viral contamination. But when we are back to doing on-the-ground interviews, I have benefited from the advice I got at the Transom workshop I mentioned above: before you go to record an interview or a scene, write out a list of sounds you might capture there. (It’s so hard to think about that on the spot, when you are trying to talk to someone and record audio at the same time.) After your interview is over, you can review your list and then take some extra time to record ambient sounds you may have missed—machines at work, highways, rushing creeks, kids playing, etc.—that will help bring your story to life.

SEH: Wonderful advice, I’ll keep it in mind! What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you today in your professional work?

MO: I’m not sure this is one skill so much as the definition of writing, but: leaning on structure and language and details to support your point. Choosing the details that relate to the larger themes you are hoping to get at, rather than relaying everything you’ve seen or experienced and using the words that sound big or impressive. I think this applies to both narrative journalism and fiction.

SEH: What is your favorite genre to read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately?

MO: Fiction. I love novels and short stories. Most recently, I devoured Megha Majumdar’s new novel A Burning and had the pleasure of interviewing her earlier this summer. Milkman by Anna Burns has the most entrancing narrator, and is one of the more unique novels I’ve read as of late. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo manages to convey character at lightning speed. I’m in complete awe of the story collection Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken. I’m currently reading and loving Lot, Bryan Washington’s collection of spare and intimate short stories set in Houston.

SEH: What a wonderful and varied list! Thank you so much for your time, advice, and recommendations.

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