World’s Oldest Intern

I have reached the age of 61 without ever having an official internship!  In college, I was busy teaching drama, mostly as a volunteer, through the community service organization. I went on the payroll of the New Haven Public Schools as a college senior, doing homebound tutoring. My summer jobs were all children’s theatre related and then were teaching gigs. So, here I am, undertaking an internship for the first time in my life. I’m excited and a little uncertain. 

A year and a half into an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, the direction of my memoir feels less certain than it did when I started, but until I write my thesis next year, I am trying not to worry about it. This year, I’m doing a deep dive in publishing.  Despite my love of books—reading them and acquiring them—I knew very little about how a book actually gets published.  In fact, after last semester’s Introduction to Publishing, I’m amazed that any book EVER gets published—there are so many obstacles, so many manuscripts, so much about the business that was unknown to me.  I’d always harbored a secret fantasy of working either in a bookstore or a flower shop, but my admiration for booksellers—real booksellers, not Amazon or Barnes & Noble--who figure out how to sell books and pay rent and salaries--has grown exponentially over the last few months. Bookselling is not for the faint of heart!  It’s a labor of love and courage, a flame of idealism in a world where better, faster, cheaper seems to be the currency. 

For the coming semester, each student in my class undertakes an internship.  When I first heard about this requirement, I panicked.  How could I jam one more obligation in to my already packed week? But, my wise professor, Kate Whouley, connected me with another professor at Bay Path. Jenn Stratton teaches teachers and has written a book about her cousin, Nick Springer, a Paralympic Gold Medalist, who lives on in Jenn’s work. 

Jenn has enlisted me to help her gather all the stories we can about disabled GIRL athletes, so we can figure out what already exists and where the gaps are. I am thrilled.  My first idea was to email the archivists at Perkins School in Boston. They were generous and swift in their response, and Jenn has already had a follow up conversation with them—I’ll be able to watch the video of that call this weekend.  Next, I asked my daughter, queen of the spreadsheet, to help me set up a template that will allow me to keep track of all the suggestions I crowd-sourced from my Facebook feed—women athletes who are disabled in many ways. 

So, I will be a research assistant and as much of a help as I can be. Talking to Jenn inspires me and makes me feel useful—I love something she said today: she wants her work to be universally designed.  So, a book about a visually impaired athlete is illustrated by a visually impaired artist and the text is in braille as well as in words, so that the visually impaired reader can access the story.  This idea of multiple ways to share a story reminds me that adapting a form to make it work for more people is not cheating—it’s asking form to reflect content.

And I am all in!