Week two of my internship was a soft introduction to the wonderful, filing-filled world of the intern. It just so happened that the week I started was the week the summer issue for the American Scholar finished. We had only just received the shipment of shiny new magazines that first Friday, and because of this, everyone was in a "down time" before the frenzy of the next issue.
Mainly this meant people resigned to the colds their adrenaline-filled bodies had been resisting for the past month or two, so workers either called in sick or sat glumly at their desks amid a pile of kleenex. My boss, the Editor, was only in twice that week, although that was because he was taking time to work on his new book. Suffice it is to say, the office was eerily quiet. My days were spent apprehensively wandering around the office, asking the survivors of the summer issue if they needed help on anything. After many sheepish smiles and shaking heads, one of the managing editors said, "well, you could work on alphabetizing the authors, or do the index for this year--if you really want to."
Oh man did I ever!
To be honest, I even enjoyed the work ad tedium. It gave me a chance to let my mind wander over story ideas and snappy quips for this blog. Not to mention I could work on proper typing techniques, something I cheated profusely at in grade school. After the first day of wrist pains, I knew I had to do things a little bit differently. Lesson one in working at an office: do things correctly out of the consequence of pain.
Something even better about the work, though, was that I could take breaks and read submissions from "the slush pile," as it's called. As I breezed through alphabetizing author papers and started on compiling the index, the slush pile piqued my curiosity more and more, until I gave in and abandoned the mental chants of archiving for what appeared to be a more interesting use of my time.
I found the slush pile, meaning unsolicited manuscripts, quite endearing, humorous and even inspirational, oddly enough. There is a reason it's called the slush pile; you slog through an awful lot of the stuff, hoping to find something...anything worthwhile. It's an adventurous hike, if not always fruitful. I admit to thinking, "oh wow, I can write better than this!" after finishing a few of the submissions, some of which were written by Ph.D-wielding doctors and lawyers and society's crem-de-la-crem.
Most of the submissions in the slush pile are travel accounts of "white Americans visiting a foreign/exotic place," or blatant pleas of self-promotion in the form of exerpts or reviews of so-and-so's new book. There is a lot of uncited and unresearched journalism. Fiction pops up every now and then. I even came across the staple "dog story"--a major faux pas of any new writer. I enjoyed myself selfishly, relishing in the schadenfreude that these older writers had fallen into pitfalls I, myself had fallen into years ago. Many of these pitfalls I now know how to avoid (hopefully), but here are people, supposedly the smartest in the world, who are still tripping over them. I thought maybe, just maybe, I can make it out there.
Once the ego-boosting elitism sudsided, I began to really look into some of the better-crafted stories. What made them stand out from the rest of the slush? What made me recognize their aptitude but ultimately write a resounding "no" atop the cover letter? Because I had the time on my hands and didn't need to sift through all of them within a two-month deadline (which was not met most of the time, as the editors told me with a sigh) I could pry the works apart and sift through the inner cogs and wires. When I found the stone bolts, I imagined the steel ones I could replace them with.
One story told of a woman who had a pseudo-religious experience in a decorated church in Spain inspired me to write a story of a man contemplating aesthetics, and why some works of art are considered greater than others. Another submission made me think of two intellectuals physically fighting over a metaphysical idea. The wide range of topics and subjects revealed a vast lake of creativity I had a hard time diving into at WAC. I do not mean to denounce the college when I say this; Chestertown is a great place for learning and studying, for really bearing down and examining the exact technicalities of writing and encourages a personal assessment of what "excellence" means.
In fact, I probably would not have had much confidence in determining what makes a "good" story had I not taken numerous writing classes at the college. Had I been a freshman before I took this internship, I would have been eaten alive for sure, not by my co-workers, but by my own competence. The wide variety of classes I have taken for the past three years allowed me to assemble this knowledge into the ability to assess the quality of a genre I'm not wholly familiar with: non-fiction.
The American Scholar is made up of mostly non-fiction including, as the name implies, academic essays, but also real-life accounts of adventure, book reviews, on-going studies of contemporary culture and a lot of long-form journalism. There is poetry and fiction too, of course, but these are recent additions to the magazine.
I know I am taking a lot of liberties in this post, maybe even to the extent of sounding arrogant. What would I know? I'm just an intern, sitting here typing out the names of successful writers with established names. I don't even have a bachelor's degree yet. Hell, I even admitted to not knowing a whole heck of a lot about the stories that are supposedly slush.
But maybe it's not so far-fetched. The American Scholar gets its name from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave a speech of the same name at Harvard in 1837. That's quite some time ago, and yet people here at the scholar and across the world are living up to Emerson's ideals, to his models of "independent-thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world." That's not something a Ph.D can get you any more than traveling to Africa will. They can help, but it is about the experience of life, of self-awareness, of living the ideals you want to see in the world. It is about excellence.
