(Caroline Casey, Jynne Martin, Leslie Shipman, Jeff Shotts, Craig Teicher) It’s often said that MFA grads do one of two things to earn money: teach writing or work in the book business. Much has been said about MFAs who teach, but writers also fill the ranks of publishing houses and other book biz institutions. This panel will focus on how writers become publishing professionals—editors, publicists, arts administrators, reviewers—and look at the ways their degrees and writerly have shaped their careers and how they do their jobs. Sponsored by Publishers Weekly.

Published Date: November 25, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Caroline Casey, Jen Martin, Leslie Shipman, Jeff and Craig Cher. You'll now hear Craig Cher provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:32):

So this is the other track MFAs in the book business. I'm Craig Cher from Publishers Weekly. What we wanted to do today, when people get an M F A, I mean at least everyone used to say, oh, you either teach after you're done or you work in publishing. And so that's not really true anymore. Now you make internet content. But I wanted to get together some people who are working at high levels in publishing who also have MFAs and have them talk a bit about how they got where they are and how their MFAs affected it. So let me just introduce everybody here. We have Carolyn Casey, who is the managing director of Coffee House Press. We have Jen Dilling Martin, who's the associate publisher of Riverhead, and we have Leslie Shipman, who's the assistant director of the National Book Foundation, and Jeff Sch, who is the executive editor at Graywolf, and I'm the director of digital Operations at Publishers Weekly. So we all work in publishing. So what I thought we'd do to start is if everybody could just for three minutes just talk about where you got your M F A and then how you got the job you have and how you got there. Should I start? Yes, and I'll sit over here.

Speaker 3 (01:45):

Hi. So I worked in publishing first and I was in acquisitions and worked at a university press, and it was really a super huge bummer because there was no money and everyone was depressed and it was just like the sky is falling all the time. And so I decided that I would go get M F A and went to the University of Iowa, got an M F A in nonfiction writing there, and instead of teaching my jobs while I was there, were all in programming. I ran the year of Arts and Humanities at the University of Iowa. And then I ran the Nonfiction NOW Conference and I was Marilyn Robinson's assistant. And so because I wasn't teaching, because I was doing programming, when I left Iowa and moved back to LA, I got a job in publicity because it was like events, it made more sense. And so publicity led to marketing. Publicity led to my current job. I worked at Seban Books and immediately previous and now I've been at Coffee House for about three years.

Speaker 4 (02:42):

Hi everyone. I'm gin. I'm the associate publisher at Riverhead, which is like the boutique literary imprint of the larger mega giant lit Penguin Random House situation. I got my M F A at Warren Wilson, which is a low residency format m f A program. So I actually did that while working full-time in publishing. So I've been in publishing for 17 years now at St. Martin's, Simon and Schuster, a random house for a very long time. And now at Riverhead you just published and my own book, we Mammals and Hospitable Times just came out, which was my first poetry book.

Speaker 2 (03:16):

I did an M F A at Columbia and really, really did want to teach very, very badly. There were no teaching fellowships to be had at Columbia. I did all these weird internships, teaching and all this stuff. And then when I was finished with my degree, I was teaching comp for a year. And then the next semester I was slated to teach five sections of comp in one semester. And I knew that that would destroy me. And so a job at Publishers Weekly opened up and I'd always been a book nerd, so I'd always been interested in working in publishing, but had never had any real experience. A job opened up working in the book room at Publishers Weekly, which is where they send all the books in the world to get reviewed. So I was essentially a glorified guy who opens envelopes, and that's what I did over years. It was the time when if you were the youngest person at a company, they needed someone to run the website. So they're like, you're young, you must know what the web is. And so I was sort of thrown that job and now I'm the director of it after many years.

Speaker 5 (04:13):

So hi Leslie Shipman and I'm the assistant director of the National Book Foundation. You know us primarily as the National Book Awards. I got my M F A in 2007 at Warren Wilson in poetry. I was lucky to know gin when I was there. I am considerably older than most people on this panel, so it would take more than three minutes to describe my career path. But I will say that I started in publishing in 1982, and I realized soon after that I wanted to be in nonprofit that I was not a great capitalist. So I moved over to literary nonprofit. I started a reading series in the early nineties, and basically I stayed close to books. That was really my one strategy was to stay close to books.

Speaker 6 (05:00):

That's my strategy too. I'm Jeff Schatz, I'm editor at Grey Wolf Press, and I did my M F A from 2000 to 2002 at Washington University in poetry. But I was fortunate in that I had four years in publishing at Grey Wolf Press where I kind of cut my teeth as an assistant. So I always like Craig, I think wanted to see if I would be a good teacher and also sort of get the idea. Many of us just sort of wondered if I could be a writer. I think many of us get into publishing with that, whether deeply in the closet or whether that's very overt. Wondered if I was good enough or wondered if I could make myself good enough. So I jumped off and did an M F A and had a marvelous experience there and found out that I was less learning about writing than I was about reading.

Speaker 6 (05:57):

And I think that's as good a reason to get an M f A as anything. And that was really valuable to me. And I was fortunate that after my four years as an assistant level at Gray Wolf, I was freelance editing poetry books for Gray Wolf from St. Louis at Washington University. And I don't know that I recommend doing freelance editing like that while you're a graduate student. It was a strange experience, but it kept me connected to the press. And Fiona McCrae, the director of Grey Wolf, very generously invited me back in 2002. And since then I've really edited and curated the poetry list at Gray Wolf and since then also do a lot of literary criticism and a lot of nonfiction editing, all of which I think connects entirely with my experience at Washington University and in my M F A. So I'm extremely grateful to that despite the fact that you won't find any of my books on a shelf.

Speaker 2 (06:56):

Cool. Thanks everybody. So can you guys all talk a little bit about how the M F A, I mean as Jeff began to do, has informed your job and your career if it has?

Speaker 3 (07:08):

I feel like I learned to read in graduate school before I went to school. I read on a very surface level, I read things quickly. It was like a novel is a cookbook, is Cosmo. It was very whipping through and I learned to really slow down and to read in a different way. And I also really learned how to work with writers, which was really important and how to be constructive and how to see why something is working and see why something isn't working. A big part of being in marketing is that you won't like every book, you will not, but you will have to be able to find what is good about it and what is different about it and what the angle is on it. So you're not lying to reviewers and saying, this is the great American novel, but you're also giving it a really decent pitch.

Speaker 3 (07:52):

And so that was really important. That's something I learned there was to find the writer's intent. And that's been really valuable for me in my work. And it also made me publishing again, I was really over it when I went to school and when I came back, I think I realized what it meant to work with those kind of writers and it also helped me learn the kind of publishing I wanted to do. So I've always since then worked for literary nonprofits, coffeehouse Red, he and Sarah Ben Books, all of which have small lists and get to work with a different set of priorities and a different set of constraints. But it's a balance that works for me.

Speaker 4 (08:30):

A poetry M F A is a little more distanced from the general mainstream big industry publishing business, but nonetheless, it has helped or been beneficial in very oblique and surprising ways through the years. Coincidentally, while I was there, so was Leslie Shipman and Megan O'Rourke both who have been incredible resources on a professional level to me, totally unrelated to Poetry Love Mother. Judith Grossman was one of the teachers and she spent my entire residency telling me how much I would love to meet her. I didn't realize it was Lev's mother, but that I would get along so well with her darling son without ever mentioning his name until the final dance party. And she's like, so let me put you in touch with Lev. And I was like, wait, Lev Grossman like, oh my God, who's the great Time Magazine book critic? And then to what Carolyn said, I think just being a deeper and wider reader makes you a deeper and wider human, which makes you deeper and wider at anything that you're trying to do. And certainly in book publishing to be widely read and deeply read helps every part of every single thing I do during my day.

Speaker 2 (09:39):

I think for me, doing an M F A, obviously you do an M f A with the hope of becoming a writer and perhaps a famous writer yourself. But I think one of the things that definitely did is made me realize that all writers are just people who want to be writers. And then I've worked in publishing all these years mostly on the kind of book reviewing side of it, but I mean, as everyone said, doing an M F A made me a committed reader and gave me a practice as a reader, but it also gave me enormous kind of sympathy for the situation that writers find themselves in of needing to be read and of having to go through all these hoops to get their books published. And so, I dunno, I always have been able to take the publishing business personally because it's also what I want.

Speaker 5 (10:30):

Yeah, thanks. I want to reiterate and sort of emphasize what all these guys said, but particularly about the learning to read, the learning to read poetry deeply and closely. And I wouldn't say for me, because I'm actually not directly in publishing, but I'm still in the industry. There's not a direct connect of my M F A and poetry to the National Book Awards. However, I do work with the poetry jury and that is one of the great privileges of my job. And so I don't have to feel like the biggest idiot in the room when I'm talking to Louise Glick or whoever it is, Claudia Rankin. So that's really been helpful. And I came to do my M F A later in life in my mid forties, and I was already very involved with books and literary nonprofits in New York City, and I had always obviously been reading and writing, but that experience of getting an M F A in poetry really was transformational for me, not only for the way I sort of interacted with poetry going forward, but my own work. But it does inform certain aspects of what I do at the foundation, and it's really a privilege actually to work with the poetry jury. So thanks.

Speaker 6 (11:42):

I think it's taken some years for me to really recognize just how much my M F A experience influences what I do at Gray Wolf while in workshop, which is a charged and bizarre atmosphere. I was the guy who I hated having my own piece up for conversation, but I loved critiquing the other people in the workshop. And I think after two years of that, I think I realized I was able to serve the art better in my own mind anyway from that side of the desk. And so that felt like a really natural move to become an editor, really to focus in terms of hopefully making their works better from the individual poem or essay or section of a book and really getting into the mechanics of how authors work. I mean, what a great place to do that in an M F A workshop.

Speaker 6 (12:44):

So I'm incredibly grateful in terms of just internalizing the tools of the trade so I can communicate with writers on common terms. But even more frankly, mercenary than that is Washington University had a, I'm not trying to advertise for them, but it was a marvelous program for me. Not only the faculty there being marvelous, but I'm bringing in a lot of visiting writers. Leslie mentioned Claudia Rankin as one, the author of Citizen, and I did my M F A from 2000 to 2002, and Claudia came and visited the program, this is more than a dozen years ago, and did a reading of what became the pharmaceutical section of her book, don't Let Me Be Lonely. That reading blew me away and I remembered it. And when I had my editorial position and was looking for great writers, I remembered that. And we published Don't Let Me Be Lonely. And then Citizen last year, even more mercenary, we now publish the work of my teacher Mary Jo Bang. And we did the essays of Carl Phillips who was there too. So I mean, as a writer too, as a writer or as an editor or someone involved in books or being your books, as Leslie was saying, just the a w P world, the M F A world is a great place to get to know people and what they're doing. And as an editor you rely on those relationship building and I've done so mercilessly

Speaker 2 (14:20):

Sort of related to that. I mean, I was on a panel the other day where someone contended that MFAs don't really give you job training of any kind, which I disagreed with a lot. And I wonder if there are other ways you feel like that there are particular skills that you need in your job that you can trace back to either the workshop experience or kind of the social experience of the M F A?

Speaker 3 (14:47):

I think one thing for me, the working with writers was kind of the opposite of Jen and Craig having that sort of sympathy for them because so many of my friends or my friends from grad school, I feel like I'm the person at the office who says no all the time because I see writers as people who are getting to exercise this incredible privilege. It is such a privilege to be able to write and have your work published. I wish that the system were more equitable and people got paid fairly and this and that, but working with the constraints that we do, it's an amazing thing to love something and be able to practice it and to have it in the world. And I don't believe in an artistic temperament that should be indulged. And that's my mic. Something that's come into play a lot with me at work, which is the not nice version.

Speaker 3 (15:36):

But like Jeff said, I loved workshop. Oh, it was so much fun and I didn't mind being up. I also almost immediately knew I didn't want to write and so I didn't care. And they'd be like, what about this? I'm like, nah, you're up, you're up. But our thesis was 75 pages and I got to the bottom of the 75th page and stopped. It's a really good place to learn about what your engagement means. And for me, I learned what I'm good at and what I'm good at is telling people what they're doing wrong and it's been really useful, but also how to do it in a constructive way. I mean, a lot of what I do and a lot of what anyone in publicity or editorial is doing is working with writers and helping them figure out what they're actually good at. Someone might say, I want to do X, Y, and Z for events, but they're actually really socially awkward and they don't enjoy being in front of people. And to be able to say no in a way that's constructive and to say no in a way that's helpful to them is something I think that the sort of crucible of workshop is very useful for because you go from being like, this is bad to how might this work? It'll helped me with my still not considerable, but definitely better interpersonal skills for that.

Speaker 4 (16:55):

I'll give a really meta answer, but it's that I think one danger, especially in big publishing is that it can be very business focused, like the business of publishing a book and a business of publishing it. Well, and that is so important because we want to be able to have an ongoing society capitalistic as it may be, where writers can be paid for a writing life. So I don't mean to demean the importance of the business of writing, but M F A programs as well as the A W P conference for me was this playground to be back in touch with why I work in books at all and why I care so deeply and how they matter and they matter in different ways to different people. And it is so fun to be, I had a great experience at Warren Wilson. It was a lot of late night parties and arguments on the porch over Arthur Zay or Whistle Orlova, some Broka or whatever. And that passion, it was so wonderful to have that be so alive for me and those friends from that program, they still bring that out in me. And then being here and getting to see them at a W P, it always brings that out. And that's a piece of me that's so important to me to stay in touch with. Even when in my day job hat there can be a focus on the numbers or the business of it,

Speaker 2 (18:14):

It seems to me that we learned most of the skills we need to make money at our jobs in a way. And I feel like my M F A made me because I really wanted to be a poet, it made me really desperate to sort of willing to adapt and do whatever I needed to do in order to get that. So then it turns out working in business, working in publishing is also about adapting a lot and compromising and sitting in rooms of people where you're not workshopping a piece, but you're having to make compromises and be articulate. And it taught me a lot about that.

Speaker 5 (18:47):

Well, sometimes staff meetings at the National Book Foundation feel like workshop because we have out of six people on our staff, three of them have MFAs and two of them came up as interns from local New York City M F A programs. But I want to just sort of touch on what Jen said also is that, yeah, I mean the social aspect is really important and I made some incredibly close friends back at Warren Wilson who I still do a monthly Google Hangout workshop with. So it's just sort of being here and interacting with all my friends from Warren Wilson and watching their careers, and particularly from the perch of the National Book Awards to watch their careers develop and be really excited when friends like gin have a book come out. Yeah, I mean it's all that kind of stuff is interwoven into it.

Speaker 6 (19:44):

I feel like I learned really on the job training as an M F A student and one of them was just the mechanics of writing. And I'm often asked about, people are very confused by how one edits poetry, and I learned much of the mechanics of that. I mean, there's such a tradition at play with poetry and being able to recognize what tools are being deployed by a poet is something that I learned a great deal both from Carl Phillips very traditional prosody classes. It's a study of verse forms where Tom Gunn was also sitting in on and Alan Bryant Voight, who I learned a great deal from at that time. But the other thing in terms of the kind of mechanics of how language works and the ability to read literary criticism but is how to treat each other. I learned a lot of empathy I think in the workshop environment in part because maybe there's some of the bizarreness that I was, they can be really mean places. And seeing people in that environment being treated poorly was something that I knew that I didn't want to participate in. The problem with that is as an editor, I'm so predisposed to want to like you, that shouldn't be a problem maybe, but it's hard to say no sometimes too. So I mean that's the thing that I almost feel like I've had to unlearn a little bit from what happens in a workshop versus what happens in the privacy of the editor's desk.

Speaker 2 (21:22):

So a couple of you have said that you are no longer writing or practicing whatever form of writing you went to an M FFA for, but can those of you who are still writing talk a bit about whether having the kind of job you have is good or bad for your creative practice? And for those of you who stopped, I wonder, did it have anything to do? I mean, you've talked a bit about it, but I don't know, does it have anything to do with the work you wanted to do? I mean, sort of looking at other writers and thinking, I don't want to be

Speaker 7 (21:48):

Something like that.

Speaker 5 (21:51):

I'm still writing. I kind of feel extremely privileged in that I feel like I'm a sort of a servant to this art that I love, which is poetry. I had a friend years ago who said, be careful of being a shadow artist. And I didn't know what that means because I didn't read the artist's way, but she did. And that is one of the dangers I think if you are a writer and you are working in publishing and around extremely successful people doing the thing that you dream of being successful about. On the other hand, it's incredibly inspiring. And to be able to interact with some of my literary heroes and heroines has been, as I said earlier, sort of a privilege and transformative for me. And when those books come into the office, I just grab 'em off the shelf and I get to take 'em home and spend quality time with them before I return them to the shelf. So it both feeds what I do, makes me ask questions about what I do and questions about my own writing. It pushes me in sort of a really good way that I had not anticipated. When you're around that sort of level of excellence all the time, that's sort of your goalpost. You may never reach it, but it's there. So yeah, it definitely is a part of it

Speaker 2 (23:21):

For me to get poetry writing done. I need to steal it from something else. And so having a job, any job really sort of crowd out my free time helps me then want to find little pockets of secret time that I can write poems in. So I kind of think having a job is not a bad thing for an artist or at least artist of a certain temperament. If it will help you feel like you're stealing your art from something worth stealing it from,

Speaker 4 (23:50):

I do write, and it took 12 years to finish and publish this collection. So in that sense, publishing, I don't know anyone in publishing who doesn't work extraordinary hours, evenings, weekends. It just is a full consuming passion project. And so just in the purest sense of it being very difficult to then find time to also be writing, I write very slowly. There's very few times a year that I sit down and actually have time to work out what's going on in the subterranean levels of my brain. And I'm on the one hand sad that it takes that long. But on the other hand, I am ferociously in love with my job, the work that I do at Riverhead. I love my authors and I also have, I would say from working in publishing maybe a little what Leslie's saying, I have a very realistic and grounded sense of the importance of my own writing in the world, which is to say, I would much rather you read Marlon James or Claudia Rankin or Juno Diaz or Mosson Hamid than my poems. My poems are good, they're special to me and they're fine. But I think the work I do at Riverhead feels in my life like the greatest calling that I have, and I'm very proud of it. And I'm not sorry that it takes as much time as it does and that I can do it in a creative and exciting way that feels meaningful.

Speaker 3 (25:09):

I don't write in my thesis defense, they said, what are your writing plans? And I said, grocery lists, emails and checks. I have stuck to that other than jacket copy, I write jacket copy. But I wanted to go into publishing because I wanted to read books for a living, which is not what it is. It was totally wrong, but it turned out to be a great fit. I wanted to get an M F A because I wanted to be a writer. I didn't actually want to write. And I discovered that almost immediately, which made, actually, I had the best time in graduate school because there was no pressure. It was a pass fail program and they don't require the G R e. So I highly recommend it. It was great. I don't have any regrets about not writing any longer or having done it. It was fantastic.

Speaker 3 (25:55):

We were talking about this before the panel started. If you're a really serious reader, this is something Jim Shepherd said once, if you're a writer, you should be a serious reader. And if you're a serious reader for a long time, you're going to see the difference between your work and the work you like. And that gap will be troublesome and it should be. I was an okay essayist. I was never going to be a great essayist, and I do not like mediocre work and I did not want to add to the pile. There's already a lot of it. And I am really good at advocating for other people's books, and I'm really good at what I do, and I'd rather be doing something I'm good at. I mean, I quit Suzuki violin after two weeks because they wouldn't give me a bow. And I was like, I can't play Shastakovich immediately done.

Speaker 3 (26:37):

So it's a better fit. And like Jen says, it's important to spend most of your waking life doing something that you feel is meaningful and that you're actually making a contribution with. And I do. I mean, I don't understand people who say, oh, you make no money or blah blah, it's all good enough. Your life is terrible. You spend all day thinking about how to sell apple jacks or whatever. That sounds so boring. I mean, if you're passionate about cereal, maybe it's for you, but it's really fun to work with excellent writing since I definitely wasn't going to be producing it.

Speaker 6 (27:16):

This question is something I feel like I've struggled a lot with about writing and not writing and what you're supposed to be doing to serve the art. And these are great answers and really helpful to me. I remember talking to Alice Quinn when she was the poetry editor of the New Yorker. I kept wondering where her great stash of poems or whatever, and I remember her saying to me, it's really useful for me not to write. And that really stayed with me. And what some of, I think she meant, I should ask her is there's a great deal of politics I think involved in this, especially as the poetry editor, the New Yorker or something. But it takes away a veneer that you're in it for something else like Caroline and others. I want to be all in the way that I can be all in.

Speaker 6 (28:16):

And that was really hard for me to figure out. And I kept thinking that I was a failure, that I wasn't writing or at least writing well. And that was really frustrating. And what I finally figured out, the reason why I was not a good writer is that I was trying to do it while editing. And there are people who can do both very well. I mean t s Eliot was pretty good and was a long time editor at Faber in London for instance. I mean, there are great examples of those who can do both. And for me, the act of both editing and immersing into someone else's writing and particularly really deeply literary writing where highly stylized writing, for instance, highly structured, unique structured of writing, there's an allure to that. So that when I would look from the page of someone whose work I was reading and then was expected to look at a page of my own writing, it was an act of schizophrenia. I mean, it felt like that. And there was no joy. There was no enjoyment in being, I couldn't wear the bifocals. And I hit my head against an anvil for a long time. And I think that's a hard way to write unless you're Hopkins. I found out I wasn't Hopkins, thank God.

Speaker 2 (29:52):

So let's kind of switch to a more practical mode. So do you guys feel like the kinds of jobs you have are available to M F A students now? And if so, how would you advise they go about pursuing them?

Speaker 6 (30:10):

I think absolutely. I mean, I think there's step over here and it's a sea of democracy and walking into a w p book fair, it's at first something, of course one does with trepidation and fear, but the moment you actually walk in and see people and writers and the engagement and the vastness of possibilities that's going on in that room is incredible. And I think all of those and more, and I mean the internet is churning as we speak. There's lots of ways I think to get involved with editing and publishing and marketing and promoting and reviewing books and blogging about them and social media. I mean, it is literally infinite. There's more opportunity than ever as far as how to go about it. The second part of Craig's question, I'm still a sucker for the internship path. Maybe in part it was mine. What's so great about publishing or I think is a great thing is one of the many traditional things about it is that it's still an apprenticeship system.

Speaker 6 (31:22):

So you really learn by doing it. I mean, you really learn by seeing other people, by learning to look how contracts are put together, how an offer is made to an author through an agent or to the author directly and on and on, how to market a book, put publicity package together for a first book of poems or a collection of essays, what have you. But really getting in and being able to do it. And what's great is many of these organizations offer really good internship programs, and I think it's a great way to step into it and also finding out it might not be for you. And one piece of advice I would say is I think a lot of people come to publishing thinking about editing and thinking about textual work. I think probably at some misbegotten stage of my own thinking about this, I probably assumed editors were people in wing back chairs with Brandy sniffers and sort of enjoying the mockery of turning down author's works.

Speaker 6 (32:33):

And it's exactly like that. As it turns out, it's been great. You should see my leather. No, but what I'm trying to get to is there are so many possibilities within publishing and I love working with I interns at Graywolf and elsewhere, seeing them maybe come in with that assumption about editing and text, digging into a text with an author, but really finding out like, wow, I really love publicity or especially on the nonprofit and I really love management issues. I really love grant writing. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to sort of, there are people who love grant writing, right, Josh, so go into those things and go into the early part of your career thinking really horizontally your position may become very vertical ultimately, but going in and being able to do, it's One of the things I love about a small press or a small magazine is it allows you an opportunity to do a lot of different kinds of things and not just, you're not in your cubicle just doing just writing press releases. And that's what you do. You get to do every day as such a kaleidoscopic experience. Get in there and roll up your sleeves.

Speaker 5 (34:04):

Everything that Jeff just said, and I mean, I would say for us, so I mentioned earlier we're very small. There's six people on our staff, three of them have MFAs. We want M F A students. We want people who are passionate about literature, who understand literature, can talk about literature, who care deeply about the work we do. I mean, that's really the bottom line. If you are coming out of M F A program, I'm assuming that about you, right? You've put your life on hold in certain ways to immerse yourself in this art. That's the kind of energy and passion that we're looking for in our staff. And I'll say that we have hired two of our interns, and I'm sure we're not the only literary nonprofit who's done that. And we do have paid internships. I would say on the practical level, we do have interns for this summer.

Speaker 5 (34:58):

They are both M F A students, but reach out to us, send us an email, send us your resume. Let us know what you're up to, why you're interested in the National Book Foundation. We're not just the National Book Awards. We do educational programs. We're very involved in educational justice issues. So I'm so lucky I get to do literary curation. I get to curate a reading series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I also get to run a program called Book Up, which is an afterschool program for middle school kids who are living in challenged neighborhoods, just keep them excited about reading. So again, I feel incredibly lucky to be doing this work, but I just want to encourage all of you guys, I mean, if you're interested in the nonprofit end, we're always looking for smart, passionate interns who love books and literature.

Speaker 3 (35:49):

I would say get involved in whatever journal or review you have in your program that is basically an internship. If you're working at any of those places, you will learn editorial, promotion, whatever. They need people to do that. We also have an internship program at Coffee House, but we hire people who have not been interns. We've hired interns, we hire people who've never interned. If you're looking, just look for entry level jobs. Don't have an ego that says, I am too old or educated to have this assistant job because those assistants get promoted. And that's happened in our office multiple times. The last three hires we had were people who had just been coming in the door. They wanted to work at the front desk, and our publicist started that way, and now she's doing a fantastic job. You can grow in an organization because you do learn on the job, as Jeff said.

Speaker 3 (36:43):

And I mean, Josh Oste Guard is a great example. He's great. Wolf's development person has a M F A and has a book with Coffee House. So there's an actual person who did this in the audience. And you weren't an intern, were you, Josh? No, I wasn't. See, you can just get the first job too. You can just go get the job, getting a job and just not treating, working and writing or writing as something precious, but as just practical. Just go get a job, just go get a job. You can just get that first job and then after that it can narrow. But I started in acquisitions. I moved over the publicity marketing side of it, and now that I've moved up the ranks, I guess eventually I've been doing this for 16 years, I get to edit if I want. And Coffee House has moved into essay more because that's my thing, and I really love essay.

Speaker 3 (37:35):

And so Chris was really open to making a space for us to pursue essay, which has been really exciting. We're doing a book on cat videos that's coming out in the fall because, well, I don't know if you've read Carl Wilson's, let's Talk About Love, the greatest book ever written about Celine Dion. We wanted to do that about Cav videos. And so we commissioned all these essays and I got to edit all of them, which was really, really hard. Anthologies are a bear, but you can do that. The other thing about being Jen is the associate publisher. She's not the head of publicity. You can be involved in the other sides of the publishing process once you get to a certain level too. So if it does feel like you're getting choked and you're only moving up one track, if you keep going, it does widen out. Again, if you're interested,

Speaker 4 (38:27):

I'll be the person who says something negative, which is, please do not in your job interview tell me that you're interviewing for job because you hope it will help your book get published or that you want to make sure that you get the manuscript to Juno Diaz the first time you meet him when you're working with me, with him working in book publishing should never ever be seen as a route to getting your book published. And there may be incidental oblique opportunities that actually do end up coming out of it, but anyone who smells that in any way during the job interview will not be interested in hiring you. Publishing is really hard work and long hours and is something to be done because it's what you want to be doing for all the other reasons we've been talking about. Not to get your book published.

Speaker 2 (39:13):

And I would just add just about what Jen just said, sometimes I think working in publishing can make it harder to publish or at least make it, I mean, because you're then going to people that you work with at your job and then saying, will you look at my manuscript? And you're trying to get these kinds of opportunities. I dunno if it makes it hard. I mean there are ways it makes it easier. There are ways it makes it harder, but it does mean that you end up wearing multiple hats with some people and that can feel strange sometimes. Jill, I wanted though to ask though, I feel like it's been my understanding that just if you wanted to work in trade publishing, it's gotten a lot harder to get in the last 10 years. I mean, do you feel like that's true or not so much?

Speaker 4 (39:55):

Only because I think we're still recovering from the economic slump. There were a lot of layoffs in the 2008 aftermath, and in some ways I think we haven't fully rebounded from that. And in general, the publishing track is slow, especially the editorial side. Do not go do that unless that's really how you want to spend the next nine years of your life before you're even allowed for the first time to edit a book or get paid more than $34,000 a year. So I think it's more, it's a slow path and then there's not a ton of turnover. The people in it are really in it, and you have to wait for one of them to drop out for there to be an opening. But I don't know. I mean, I know that it's more or less than it ever was. It's hard to say.

Speaker 2 (40:39):

So why don't we see if anyone has questions for us,

Speaker 8 (40:47):

But some of you as far as,

Speaker 2 (40:55):

So the question is about low residency versus full-time MFAs and how that has affected careers unfolding.

Speaker 6 (41:04):

I went to a residency program, so I'll start with that and then maybe Leslie and Jen can talk about that. I really wanted, part of the reason anyway that I wanted to go to a residency program is I wanted to see if I could handle teaching. So I went to a program that allowed us to teach. I was hungry for that. I was interested to see if academia, if I wanted to go to that other track. And that was really useful to go in there without a safety net in some cases and get in front of students and again, learn by doing it. So that's one plus it seems to me in terms of the sort of residency experience, if that's really thinking about academia, I think I would lean you toward a residency if you're thinking about also learning how to become a teacher.

Speaker 5 (41:58):

Well, for me, as I mentioned earlier, I did my M F A later in life and part of that was my personal circumstances allowed that to happen. I mean, I've been writing since I was 15. I never really matured out of poetry and I'd been doing workshops in New York City and all this time, but I'd always wanted to get my M F A. In the meantime, I was working at the National Book Foundation. I had a 16 year old daughter in high school, and I could not uproot my life in any way. I had to work full time. I mean, I remember, I'll never forget my final semester, I was not living in the city, I was commuting into the city, so I was commuting in working full-time, doing my M F A, which meant doing numerous annotations. I dunno if you guys do this, but it's a really big part of Warren Wolfs.

Speaker 5 (42:46):

And so I would get home by eight o'clock, throw food in my face and my daughter's face, and then sit down and write an annotation on Hopkins and sprung room. It was like, this is what I did. And later on when she was applying for college, so it was just, for me, it was a personal circumstances situation. I needed a full-time job. I needed to keep my daughter in school, but my low residency experience was extraordinary. I mean Warren Wilson, not to again sell it, but it is a great program. And then that immersion really was transformative for me in every way and relationship to my own work and just being in my business too. And yeah,

Speaker 4 (43:30):

I'm a huge evangelical proselytizer for the low residency format. I will lay this on you, my friend. It trains you what the rest of your life will be like, which is, unless you come from incredible privilege and money and have a little yacht that you ride around on, you will be working a full-time job while trying to be a writer in the world. And nothing sets you up better for the habits and skills and lifestyle to understand that than doing a low residency format and finding that you have to make time on the evenings. You have to make time on the weekends, be diligent, carve out space and what it looks like to actually do that while having a job going on. And I think it instilled in me discipline as well as the knowledge that in fact, if I want to make the hard choices, that space is there and I can't just make excuses about job. And I think of the many, many gifts of the program, that is one really phenomenal gift in addition to then not having to quit your job and not be making money while also then spending a lot of money in many cases to be going to a program. So

Speaker 2 (44:32):

I did my M F A I took a year off after college and then did my M F A and I really had had no work experience and had very little idea of what I wanted to do in a practical sense other than I knew I loved poetry and wanted to be writing it the rest of my life. For me, doing a full-time program was sort of the biggest best gift I ever gave myself, and it was just two years where I didn't really have to think about much else other than I will someday publish a book. And I still sort of draw on my memories of it and my sense of the commitment it meant I was making, and it's been 12 years now and my life is very different, but I dunno, I like to think that the M f A can be or should be something that you do out of joy and out of love and that those are the practical reasons you do it. And so I think a full-time program can be a chance to just do that for a little while, though it does, it can gum up some of the things you have to do afterward, and it is time you're not in the workforce maybe, but I don't know. It's been very profound for me to have done it.

Speaker 7 (45:36):

Fair counterpoint.

Speaker 2 (45:40):

Other questions?

Speaker 7 (45:42):

Yeah.

Speaker 9 (45:43):

You talked about how working in the book industry affected your writing lives, but what about your reading lives?

Speaker 2 (45:49):

So the question is, how has working in the book industry affected our reading lives? That's a good question.

Speaker 3 (45:56):

I think the thing that's really hard to learn, but you have to learn at a certain point is you have to read for fun. If you work in books, you read books for work all the time, and the number is endless. It is an infinite number that you could be reading for work. And if it's what you do for your job only, it stops being fun. And none of us are compensated well enough to not be doing this because we love it. You have to make space to read for yourself, and I think it opens up all kinds of possibilities of what you even know about, but it really is a negative actually how much access to books you have because it takes away the joy of it and the reason that you started doing it in the first place. And so creating that space and saying, I'm not going to read the manuscript. I'm not going to take a second pass after the revision because maybe the ending changed to really make time to read for pleasure, purely for pleasure, otherwise, you'll absolutely burn out on books and on why you bother doing this in the first place. So that part has been really important, I think.

Speaker 7 (47:03):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (47:04):

I agree. I also do a lot of book reviewing and I find that I have to kind of make piles both in my head and on my desk of these are books that I'm doing for work and these are other totally different books. Often that, or it's like there'll be a book that'll come out and I'll have to tell myself I'm not going to review that because I want to actually read it for fun and I don't want to feel like I have to take notes and I have to kind of worry over it. It is weird to have the thing you like doing the best also be so much the thing you're doing for money or related to the thing you're doing for money, though I still love having infinite access to books. I get a lot of books in the mail and it feels like it's Christmas every day, and I've gotten a lot of books for a long time, and I still feel like it's Christmas. I know, and my wife hates it

Speaker 6 (47:55):

On

Speaker 5 (47:56):

That point. Yeah, it's an embarrassment of riches, and I just want to say I do the same thing. What I do, I kind of look back at my undergraduate education and go like, okay, where are the holes? And I'll admit to you, I do not read all the finalist books. I haven't read all the nonfiction. Life is short, so I read the books that I'm really interested in that are finalists. But generally in the summer I'll do an immersion of stuff that I haven't read enough. So I did a Virginia Wolf immersion a couple years ago. I did a George Elliot, and that is so joyous to me. I'm always interested in the latest thing, but I just ultimately don't necessarily feel compelled unless there's something about it that really speaks to me. It has to remain this sort of joyful interaction with the great texts.

Speaker 6 (48:46):

I'll just try to answer it briefly. My kids are saving me. I get to read a lot of Frog and Toad, Amelia Bedelia. Seus is good. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 (49:02):

I am reading the Harry Potter series to my son, and it is just, I look forward to it in a way that I don't look forward to anything else that I am reading.

Speaker 6 (49:13):

I read my kids William Blake too.

Speaker 2 (49:20):

Other questions.

Speaker 9 (49:22):

How common is it or how advisable to pursue simultaneous careers in publishing and

Speaker 2 (49:28):

Teaching? Oh, that's a good question. The question is how common is it and how feasible is it to pursue simultaneous careers in publishing and teaching? Let me start, because I do that more than anything in the world. I wanted to be a teacher. It's still, I think, perhaps tied with poetry. I think it's my favorite thing in the world to get in front of a room with students and create a conversation. So I was never willing to give that up, even though it was clear I was going to make most of my money in my twenties from this other job. So basically I teach a two load after work every semester, which is a little crazy, but it was something I had to do also to afford raising a family in New York City. I think it is pretty possible to do, and I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (50:13):

I think it's related to that doing what you love thing. I mean, if you want to teach, you can work as an adjunct, which is what I do. And if you do it long enough, you end up getting to a level where it does pay real money and you have to publish a book and you have to stick it out for a while, but then it can be a great supplement to your income and it can be a great way to feel like you're not giving up something that you love. So yeah, I think it's a totally worthwhile goal.

Speaker 6 (50:46):

To say something on that too is one of the interesting things that I think a lot of liberal arts colleges in particular that are under duress, English departments attempting to keep their numbers up and they're under duress in the way that what are their students going to do after their graduate is just such a massive, it's always been a question, but it seems even more so where it's just there's a burden behind it. One of the things that locally in St. Paul McCallister College has been having me, I teach a publishing class, which is a thing I've totally made up. There's unfortunately no great textbook at the moment for that. But as Craig said, it's a great joy. It's a difficult thing to do, but I think there's more, I'm seeing more and more of these kind of publishing classes both at the graduate and undergraduate level and not just at liberal arts colleges. And if that's available to interview, it's a great way to kind of see it and a great thing to teach if you're in the publishing industry too.

Speaker 2 (51:45):

Yeah, and let me add a couple things. So yeah, also I think really teaching itself is the great thing, not necessarily what you're teaching mean. So if you love teaching, then you'll probably start teaching comp and comp can be hard, but it's also the same thing. You're getting up in front of a room of people and you have to get them excited to be in that room. So I know a lot of people who seem to only want to teach creative writing. That takes a while, and that does take a book and that does take just time and it's very competitive. But you can probably start teaching comp or something like that right out of M F A because there's a real need for it and it's great experience and it can be fun. And then when you're ready to teach creative writing, then hopefully that will open up.

Speaker 9 (