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Interns Speak Up! Candlewick Interns Share their Experiences

Shadin Al-Dossari, Publicity Intern:

Candlewick was my first real publishing internship. I had interned at a literary journal and a creative writing center, but my time at Candlewick really gave me a complete idea of what the book industry is like. The people who work at Candlewick truly do their best to help make themselves available to you, even for something as simple as chatting over a cup of coffee. The entire office environment is friendly; it felt so nice to be surrounded by people who are just as passionate about children’s literature as I am.

Through the warm and friendly publicity team I learned industry lingo I had never heard of, enhanced skills that were previously mediocre, and gained knowledge about different facets of the book world. Another fun part of the internship was the “Books We’re Reading” board, which is exclusively for the awesome people who make up Candlewick’s Publicity and Marketing department. The board is a fun way to get book recommendations, start a conversation about what others are reading, and is a cool way for interns to feel included.

Another time I consistently felt included was every Tuesday at 11 am. I was giddy because I got to sit in on the publicity meetings which were such a treat. During those meetings, I was almost spellbound by the mundane things that were discussed such as who would go to what conference, bulletin updates and our next pre-order campaign. I couldn’t help it, I was getting to see what went on behind the publicity door, no one else got to hear these things.

I feel incredibly lucky to have been given this internship opportunity and won’t forget the people I met here, nor the things I learned. Plus, what other publishing company has a ‘bring your dog to work’ day?

Shadin Al-Dossari is a WNDB grant recipient, Publicity intern at Candlewick Press, and a student in Emerson’s Writing, Literature and Publishing program. She’s an avid reader of all things, particularly YA and an enthusiastic hockey fan, as well as a part-time knitter.

Michaela Glover, Editorial Intern: As a WNDB Internship Grant 2018 recipient, my internship at Candlewick Press has been an enormous blessing and a great opportunity. When I first entered through the glass doors, I immediately saw the Candlewick bear made entirely out of legos.  Then I saw a huge wall of books on the left side of me and more books, just above the receptionist desk, to my right.  I knew from that moment that this internship was going to be fantastic. On that day, I met my supervisor, Melanie Cordova, and she was full of positivity and smiles. From then on my experience at Candlewick was just like my first day; it was filled with positive people, smiles, and beautiful books. The atmosphere was amazing and I loved how my opinion and thoughts were truly appreciated. I even made it onto one of the illustrator search meeting notes!

During my time at Candlewick Press, I wrote several reader’s reports and with Melanie’s guidance, I became a better writer. I learned to slow down and reflect on what I had written and learned to trust myself. Overall, the Candlewick experience was amazing and I would do it all over again.

Michaela Glover is a WNDB Grant Recipient and Editorial Intern at Candlewick Press. Michaela has recently graduated Cum laude majoring in English from the illustrious Spelman College. When Michaela is not reading, she’s learning ASL, performing the Moulin Rouge soundtrack at random times, and getting beat up by her 7-year-old niece, Nyla, frequently.

Mikaela Luke, School and Library Marketing Intern: When I meet up with friends after work, they often jokingly ask me if I spent the day reading. The truth is, I really do read a lot on the job. The office truly is decked out in colorful posters, my team is incredibly affirmative and incredibly stylish, and yes, there is a stack of picture books on my desk right now. I try to tone things down – out of kindness, of course, to my other college-aged friends with much more bleak cubicle spaces for the summer – because I know I’m lucky. As a sociable bookworm who loves all things cozy, a day job in book publishing is not just something I commute to with happy satisfaction. I wake up every day and revel in the perks.

But really, it isn’t just these perks of being in a homey office, where I feel so welcomed and myself in that contribute the most to this sense of gratitude. While out for a quick check-in over ice cream with my two supervisors one mid-internship afternoon, it dawned on me. I like working with children’s literature because we’re talking to librarians, teachers, instructors, parents, reviewers, award committees … all these different groups of non-children. It seems that inevitably, through books, we engage in a grander conversation about what we all want for the next generation and generations to come. As much as I soak in the luxury of being in a comfy bubble where nerding out about books is the norm – this much more serious, educational, dialogue-driven, visionary aspect of working in children’s publishing, to me, is the greatest perk of all.

Mikaela Luke is the School and Library Marketing intern at Candlewick Press and a fourth-year English student at UC Berkeley. When she isn’t chattering away about books or her home (and dog) in Canada, you can usually find her listening to podcasts, adding to her notebook collection, or shopping for gifts.

solidarity in sites of temporary hospitality, you do what you can with what you’ve got

Text written August 2018. For Hagen Verleger (ed.), Margaret van Eyck—Renaming an Institution, a Case Study (Volume Two: Comments, Contexts, and Connections), Peradam Press, NY, 2018.

https://hagenverleger.com/portfolio/margaret-van-eyck-volume-two/

 Prelude/Postscript

He was talking about the library as a site of radical hospitality: because the person holding the space cannot know the content of all that is being held, in fact it is better if they don’t, because then their focus is on the hospitality, rather than making their own voice among the tangles of sentences in some of the books. [1]

She was critiquing the Western European perspective of not articulating a voice as a way of dealing with colonial guilt. Her critique was that this was both an attempt at empathy but also extremely privileged. [2] What do you do when you’ve wasted your own epistemologies by using them so violently, when you’ve taken up all the space already, how is it possible to make work that listens, can you speak, how do you learn to speak more quietly when you’ve been trained to be at the centre, should you shut up and fuck off? What are all the men doing?

We were swimming in the studio, lesbian empathy. Notes everywhere, to self, to unknown, to a different self, from a different self.

“Capacity Based Exchange,” he was saying; each according to what they can do. All share. [3]

“We share values,” someone says [4], but the values didn’t get a name so how do “we” know? And even if they had a name, there is that big gap between the word and its meaning, that space for editing and remaking and erasing, as Christina Sharpe says. [5]

While you’re reading this, think about friction. Dirty fingers rubbing paper, skin on skin, bodies that don’t fit. Rubbing up the wrong way. “Remember: deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard.” [6]

I was supposed to be writing about dust, and dirt, and sweat. And books. The books that you taught me tell you things even if you think that as books they’re boring, the books I was learning to read as a context not as content. The catalogue shelf for example, filled with female editors care-taking the writing of male essay writers, the exhibitions in regional institutions, the work of the institution we are in represented as books, all this labour and how do I read it now. Not carefully enough, I feel. 

Making change is dirty, tiring, boring, upsetting, enraging, finding your allies. Unending.

It was dark, to protect the books, and cool, but not cold, and certainly not damp. The room was sound-proofed, from the mixed musical fragments thrown out the windows of the conservatory, by the trees standing in the garden, the blanket of carefully selected ground-covering perennials, a village of bicycles chained to the fence, and the partial jutting out of the opposite wing of the building. A place to go and write. A place to go and hide in plain sight. A place to go and observe from your quiet seat the comings and goings of the management (collective noun) and the management (verbal noun). The caretaker, writer, poet. The librarian, writer, novelist. Two of the beautiful possibilities of provincial life where people are allowed to slide into roles for which they are not officially trained but are precisely skilled, temperamentally matched, committed, and able to bring some flow and energy.

Dust/Dirt made from particles of paper residue left over from cutting the pages, microfibres from cleaning cloths, dead human skin cells detached from their organ, sugar granules, dust mites, desiccating coffee molecules, food particles, broken-down hair follicles, tobacco threads, traces of drugs in pre- and post-ingestion forms, clay particulate from the soil outside, DNA, fragments of art materials, faeces, sand, sweat. It is sticky from the proteins; the human matter. The type of paper in each book must alter the dust composition through its attractant or repellent qualities. And what is that smell, the book smell that indicates its age roughly, is it accumulated dust and sweat? 

A room with a dry smell. Most of the books too well-kept, or not so old as, to have foxed pages and those moist smells familiar in memories of rummaging in boxes at sales and in garages. Archival quality papers, hot pressed smoothness, the chemical grassy smell of freshly printed large distribution. The occasional papers [7]—A4 printed essays, stapled and set into plastic folders, flopping awkwardly among the books, their matt surfaces supporting tough content asking questions of the ranks of catalogues memorialising indistinct exhibitions of regional and international artists; remnants of the theory department persisting in participants that came after holding fast to writing as a critical tool. Radical, beautiful thought unfolding in 11pt fonts. Their format whispering, refusing, sticking to academic norms; their words shouting “find me you fucker.” Documents of group processes made public in pages—the process evading the printing press—presented fragments and transcripts, quotations and diagrams, occasional bit-mapped photographs; everything is Riso-printed, upstairs, on creamy absorbent paper stock. 

She was angry. Sunday morning. Dressed prettily, playing music, angry. She was tired, sitting among the aisles working quickly, but making slow movement along. He was bored, writing lists of new curricula. They were sad. The energy was held unevenly, fed by stolen-or-shared cigarettes and sweet coffees, chatting outside on the wooden platform, red wine, moments of recognition and pleasure, durations of pointlessness, biscuits and trail mix. How many days? Rushes of energy—who bought all this African philosophy in the early 1990s! Quick shelves: bleak. Fiction for instance, clang each spine on the metal shelf quickly. Quick shelves: like friends. Feminism for example, this, this, this, oh not that one, wonder why, not much to turn here because women wrote this shelf mostly. Put the single book about masculinities on the collective pile. Finding things like jewels on the beach, books you’d forgotten about, books you’d heard of but never encountered, books you’d never met, books not very present on the internet. Fantasies of who was ordering these, stories of books being trashed and rescued resistantly from the piles of waste. Epistemological wastage [8] comes in overlapping layers: firstly, and undoably always continuingly, violent; later or simultaneously through violence’s secondary forms of stupid, penny-pinching, “progressive” [9] bureaucracy. 

They were fighting a bit, one likes big gestures, one likes small details, so it is difficult. Strategically, politically, and ontologically different ways of dealing with the question and its answer: “And who does the labour benefit? The institution really.” These positions are fighting around and within me. The details liker is directed, like an animal following a scent, there is a sensitivity to something in the air that I can’t perceive, they’re sure of the path they’re moving along, but not so sure that they’re not open to taking another one if something comes up. The big gestures seeker worries more—I can relate to this—maybe because the pressure of that expectation is a bit crushing. What kind of self-confidence and stamina do you need to continue with a task that is so temporary, that many would regard as futile? 

Learning

Learning the knowledge that your body is remembering anew, again—

does it forget in order to survive, like some bodies somehow forget the physicality of cumulative not sleeping in baby feeding periods and desire to fuck reproductively again, 

does it forget because it takes too much energy to remember the way it stiffens when it is threatened, in between all the times when someone chooses to assert their existence in a mode of power and threat against yours,

does it sometimes ignore what it actually is knowing all the time, because life would be too sad and raging if it did acknowledge this without the caring company of the others in this room, or other others in other rooms

—of how hard it is to make change, just how repetitive and boring and physically hard it is to do even this one tiny thing. When this one tiny thing is complete the how hard is suddenly so visible and makes that systemic oppression clear. This is what it means. It means billions fewer words in space. Galaxies of thought that have no space in here. Making stories to remember important information. Making gatherings to learn how to do things. Getting out of bed to go take care of the thing you were doing yesterday and see how it is now it’s tomorrow. Making peace. Making reparations. 

Learning the contingencies of making decisions as you go along, the system can never be perfect and consistent. This time I felt generous, this time not, this one was a balance of problems, this one breaks the rules entirely but it is an important book that should be visible so I put it on the table.

Books are carbon, captured, stable, running without a data centre. A wasted epistemology is also often wasted land-water-air. My wasting epistemology is made of your natural resources, and your body, because mine weren’t and isn’t enough. But I feel my greed and overuse as not having enough, being underfed, dysmorphia of the body, the culture, the interconnectedness of it and us all. 

Prelude/Postscript

The difficulty of doing things differently, the slowing down or changing of methods. Inductive reading, reading across time, lingering in the period between two publication dates to see what changes between one text and the other. Time, hearing and time, time is material, time is everything, time is not straight, time was, time is, time will, now and not now, two kinds of time, or three, past present future, or more, entanglement of all the possible and actualised times, waiting for time to pass until something heals, but what if it doesn’t ever heal, or it can’t, it’s eaten into the DNA that’s being passed around, it's so embedded in the structural oppressions that it can’t yet heal into something else, because it never stopped happening, it’s not past, it’s now. 

Everywhere the time is being stolen that’s needed to do this work. Stolen from and stolen by, stolen in order to do, and stolen from that possibility.

In the car you said something like, “maybe we should all refuse to speak in the moderated and mediated rational language we’re taught to think it’s better to fight in so we don’t look emotional.” [10]

[door of the public speaking/shaming room slams, shaking the seats]

[walls of the broken-into-on-the-weekend library ring with thought and study and laughter]

[1] Nick Thurston, “Speculative Libraries” (talk, PrintRoom, Rotterdam, June 18, 2018).

[2] Cristina Bogdon, “Fuck off Transmediale (provisional title),” Revista-Arta, (February 8, 2018): http://revistaarta.ro/en/column/fuck-off-transmediale-provisional-title/

[3] Michel Bauwens, comment made during “FAQs on the Commons and Art” roundtable (launch event, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, June 9, 2018).

[4] A comment I have encountered, unspecified like this, on too many occasions recently.

[5] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[6] Sarah Ahmed, “Refusal, Resignation and Complaint,” feministkilljoys, (June 28, 2018): https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/

[7] E.g. E.C. Feiss, A Critique of Rights in “We Are Here” (Maastricht: Charles Nypels Lab, 2015).

[8] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

[9] Conversations with various friends and acquaintances who work in libraries indicate that numerical quantities of loans, stripped of any other information, are being used as the marker of success and value, at the level of the whole library, the performance of the individual librarian, and the worth and necessity to the collection of each individual book.

[10] I’m paraphrasing a private conversation here.

Broadway Pop!

I have fallen in love with Funko Pops figures -- they're so odd but so wonderful. In recent months, Funko has released several Little Shop of Horrors figures, as well as two versions of both Danny and Sandy in Grease, and big collections of figures from Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. But wait, there's more! I was fortunate enough to happen upon Amanda Tang's Broadway Pop store on Etsy, and it was like I had died and gone to musical theatre memorabilia heaven. She has custom Funko Pops for Hamilton, Newsies, Wicked, Book of Mormon, Phantom of the Opera... But it gets even better. You can commission special orders from her! Would anyone really think I could have that information and not act on it? I couldn't help myself. So I asked Amanda to create a trio of figures for me, Billy Crocker, Reno Sweeney, and Moonface Martin, in the original 1934 Anything Goes. See the photo above to see how cool they turned out! Amanda is totally open to suggestions... About the same time, I discovered the very cool work of Brian Reedy, brother to New Line's resident graphic artists, Matt Reedy, who's been designing all the New Line posters since 2006. That family clearly has good artsy genes. Brian's already made a Hamilton woodcut, and an Audrey II linocut, both incredibly cool and both for sale in Brian's Etsy store. Having found both these artists, I've been thinking about all the ways my artist friends could make money creating musical theatre related merchandise. There's already a ton of it on Etsy, though most of that is uninspired. And there's a large, easy-to-target fan base eager for cool stuff like that. That fan base probably skews younger (which is good for the art form!), but it also includes people my age. I started thinking of all the musical theatre characters that would make excellent Funko Pops or linocuts. To work, the character needs a pretty distinctive, iconic look, that translates clearly into these different, necessarily simpler forms. And that made me think about what characters in musical theatre have a look that transcends the original actor who played the role -- or in some cases, characters whose look was set forever by the original actor.

For instance, even with the simple, almost expressionless faces of the Pops, a red sequined dress and red feathered headdress are unmistakably Dolly Levi, at that one specific moment, coming down the stairs of the Harmonia Gardens during the intro to the title song. The same is true of Cassie's red rehearsal clothes, Mame's gold jumpsuit and short haircut, Mrs. Lovett's bizarre side curls... Once I started thinking about this, I couldn't stop. Imagine Pops and/or linocuts, and/or whatever other things we can dream up, depicting... Dolly Levi (in the red dress!)      In a set of three! Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, and Streisand (in gold)! Maybe also Bette? Lola from Kinky Boots Evan Hanson from Dear Evan Hansen Zaza (and Albin?) from La Cage aux Folles

Ti Moune from Once on This Island

Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof

Don Quixote from Man of La Mancha

Stew from Passing Strange Mame Dennis from Mame (in the gold jumpsuit!)

Cassie from A Chorus Line Princess Winifred from Once Upon a Mattress Charity Hope Valentine from Sweet Charity Pres. Jackson from Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson Ethel Merman, as a career-spanning set      Including Reno in Anything Goes, Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, and Rose in Gypsy Chita Rivera, as a career-spanning set      Including Anita in West Side Story, Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and the Spider Women in Kiss of the Spider Woman Porgy and Bess from Porgy and Bess Jeremy, Michael, and the Squip from Be More Chill Tracy and Edna Turnblad from Hairsprayy Mother and Coalhouse Walker Jr. from Ragtime Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady

Prof. Harold Hill and Marian the Librarian from The Music Man

Rev. Purlie and Lutiebelle from Purlie Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd Elphaba and Glinda from Wicked Hedwig and Yitzhak from Hedwig and the Angry Inch J. Pierpont Finch and JB Biggley (and Rosemary?) from How To Succeed in Business... Sally Bowles and the Emcee (and Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz?) from Cabaret      Do two sets -- the original 1966 look AND the 1990s revival look Berger, Claude, and Hud from Hair Laurie, Curly, and Jud from Oklahoma! Anna and the King from The King and I Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart from Chicago Capt. Macheath, and Mr. & Mrs. Peachum from Threepenny      Not sure which version... the original 1928 Berlin production? The famous 1950s off Broadway production? The sexy 1970s Public Theatre production...?

The whole cast of the original Fantasticks The three (four?) Dreamgirls

The whole cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee All the leads from Spring Awakening All the leads from In the Heights All seven leads from Rent All the leads from Avenue Q All the leads from Into the Woods I could keep going. For a long time. But I won't. I'm sure by now you have a dozen in your head that you can't believe I left off my list. I feel your pain. But also, I'm thinking, how much would I (and you) LOVE Pops and linocuts of Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill Finn, Pasek and Paul, Joe Iconis, Kander and Ebb, and sure, why not, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although personally, I'd love to have a Rodgers and Hart set! And while I'm on a roll, also Hal Prince, Tommy Tune, Bob Fosse, George C. Wolfe, Michael Bennett, Susan Stroman, Michael Mayer, Michael Greif, George Abbott, George M. Cohan... Just think of the thousands of dollars I could blow if all of these were available. Maybe this post isn't such a good idea after all... I'll just leave it there for now... But stop by and see Amanda and Brian and their cool work...! Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/01/broadway-pop.html