Tag: intern

Meet Our New Intern Jillian A. Fantin

Surrounded by blurred-out houses, fences, and grass, the author is shown from the waist up in a black compression tank with a gold septum ring and a gold nostril hoop. Their right arm contains a number of black and grey tattoos visible, including fuschia flowers, an American Traditional snake, and an envelope with a heart seal. They have a medium-brown, wavy mullet, dark thick eyebrows, and are looking straight at the camera with a blank stare.

According to my family, my toddler self regularly restated the same full sentence from Disney’s Dumbo (1941) when expressing excitement: “You said it, we rolled ‘em in the aisles!” This line is impossibly obscure, and it took my parents weeks to discover the source of my incessant parroting. Oddly enough, this two-year-old in their parents’ student flat in Sheffield predicted a life not unlike the shrouded circus clown stripping away their last performance of the night and reveling in the response of a crowd.

My tendency towards being a little court jester, eager mimic, and linguistic alchemist emerged at quite an early age. I adored reading, especially the part when I slipped into the different word-worlds of poetry. In second grade, I memorized and performed A.A. Milne’s “Market Square” for my class’s Mother’s Day celebration, complete with four stuffed rabbits that smelled of leftover Easter chocolate. When my mother laughed, something clicked. I had chosen that poem because it made me laugh to read, particularly because of its repeated “silly-sounding” words like “Tuppence,” “rabbit,” “mackerel,” and especially the sonically-charged “nuffin’.” Who wouldn’t love rolling all those sounds around in their mouth? When tired of memorization and recitation, I turned to books, any books that I could find, for a glimpse into the way different people and their different worlds played with language. From a very worn anthology of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and the “Looking Back” sections of every American Girl historical chapter book to the translation of Ancient Egyptian myths my father brought back from his workplace, I devoured worlds and joined them as their excitable spectator. My favourite words, though, remained the silly ones: ones with so many syllables you tripped over them before you reached the last letter, ones that made you think of something completely opposite of its assigned meaning. I adored words, and would copy them down in shaky cursive over and over until even the lines seemed to take on their own sound.

My early love of silly words, especially the way sounds felt in and escaped from the body, became a fascination with gibberish, which morphed with a love of performance—specifically the artistic presentation of my own body—and the creation and implementation of rituals for the purposes of artistic creation. Acting became one of the many outlets of my urgent need to express, as did regular reverent listening sessions of David Bowie, Meat Loaf, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. Ultimately, though, neither theatre nor music satiated my interests in the creative explication of language, and I left for university truly believing I would only ever have the chance to use language as a tool of clear communication and literary analysis. However, what hegemonic economic and educational values attempted to squash, writers and scholars like Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Elise Houcek, Mark Sanders, Roy Scranton, Zoe Darsee, and more than I can ever name, fostered. Through their generous advice, workshopping, research, and insight, I found a platform—namely, poetry—for taking gibberish seriously. As a poet in my MFA cohort, I explored sonic expression in written text, the dissolution and restructuring of words in shape and definition, and the way systems of power privilege certain words and grammatical structures over others, among other fascinating aspects of performativity, identity, and expression. Honestly, Milne’s “Market Square” and those chocolate bunnies feel closer to me now more than ever (and honestly, I might do some erasure-ekphrasis to try and find a similar moment sometime soon!).

Though I’m not exactly a John Lennon fan, I do admit he sang the truth in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I never imagined I would share CAConrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and Adrian Matejka’s Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain with the students attending Holy Cross College in Westville Correctional Facility. I still cannot believe that I led discussions on Kim Hyesoon, Eileen Myles, and Akwaeke Emezi in self-designed Intro to Creative Writing and Intro to Poetry classes at the University of Notre Dame, and I certainly never dreamed that I would be taken seriously in my love of the silly, the stupid, the gibberish. Now, I perform the personas found within my poetry manuscripts, including a sentient necktie, a transmasc seahorse collective, and a parody of Platonic dialogue based off the relationality between the friends of the Jackass franchise. There is no masking to be found in my poetic expression regardless of these various beings speaking and moving through my body. Rather, there is clownery: a profound act, a display of my whole body and its ability to generate an authentic form of energy through intentional performativity.

Regardless of when I’m actively performing poetry or not, I think I’m still like a court jester, tiptoeing the line of potentiality often forced between poetry and humor. Poetry and clownery, for me, work hand in hand, and my serious drive in both of these fields necessarily intersects to negate any powers that claim the authority to hierarchize words, sounds, and linguistic expression. The mothers, dogs, and clowns, as Bowie sings in “Life On Mars?”, have no need for such hegemony. Perhaps that’s the reason I cofounded RENESME LITERARY, a Twitter-based literary project based in the themes of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and, more broadly, in what our journal calls “abominations”—that is, any work of literary art that strays from and even defies mainstream publishing ideals, as well as the works pushed out of traditional venues in favor of maintaining the quiet of a status quo. I am excited to be part of Sundress Publications to uphold these exact values and support the great work of all writers, especially marginalized and oppressed writers.

Writing about myself is never going to get any easier, and this is no different. Nevertheless, my excitement to be part of Sundress Publications as an Editorial Intern this year eclipses those feelings of inadequacy. But then again, I think of with these words from Meat Loaf’s “Bad Attitude”: “Behind every man who has somethin’ to say / There’s a boy who had nothin’ to prove.” And I also remember the opening line of Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” that I’ve carried with me every day for years, especially for those moments when I think of negating my artistic worth due to my love of explicating gibberish and nonsense: “A poem is a gesture towards home.” A poem is a gesture towards home, and each writer looks towards that home through their writing, whether they know that home yet or not. However, I’m finding that home slowly but surely, and I look forward to continuing that journey through service to Sundress.

An ending manifesto: I am a clown, I am a poet, I am a poet clown. I’ll have them rolling in the aisles, and I’ll applaud in the aisles for them the same night.

Jillian A. Fantin (they/them) is a poet with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow, and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of RENESME LITERARY. Jillian received BAs in English and Political Science with an emphasis in Political Theory from a small university in Birmingham, Alabama, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry and a graduate minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in American Journal of Poetry, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.

Project Bookshelf: Jillian A. Fantin

A yellow board book propped up on a brown bookshelf. The book reads "The Wonder Book of Clowns" in black and red block letters. The cover illustration is of a bald clown with white face paint, a big red prosthetic nose, a black and red painted smile, and a stuck out tongue.

When people come to visit, they always tend to say a variation of two things in the same sequence:

Wow, that’s a lot of books. Have you read them all?

and

How do you sleep with that clown staring at you?

I love answering those questions, though sometimes it gets old convincing people that clowns* and I get on quite well. When you actually take a look inside this 1955 board book, you find it to be filled with amusing little quatrains bent on explicating the different ways various clowns use their physical bodies to produce laughter. Yes, The Wonder Book of Clowns is a children’s book, a product of a time when clowns—both as a concept and a vessel—functioned as a repository of/for humor. However juvenile, this thirty-five cent picture book serves as a reminder of the brilliant worlds that literature opens for exploration.

Although I recall a number of books from my childhood, I remember most of them all together in a big blob of language that encouraged my continued exploration of the literary arts. I do remember reading, however, one poem in one story in the November/December 2007 issue of American Girl Magazine: “Snow Angel.” The story is quite simple, with one sister plagiarizing another sister’s old poetry assignment, getting in too deep with the lie, and eventually coming clean and writing her own poem and gaining a new perspective on herself and her creative abilities. But that poem. That poem! Simply titled “A Christmas Acrostic,” the story’s central poem cemented itself to my heart and fascinated me to no end. Poems could spell words with their lines? Poems could invoke the senses? Poems could be written in color? Already armed with the power of language in stories, my nine-year-old self now recognized that the abilities of language extended beyond the words themselves.

An upward view of a bookshelf with books stacked both vertically and horizontally on top of each other. A porcelain "Pierrot" doll sits on the shelf, with a purple silk jumpsuit with white pom poms and a white ruff.

That recognition encouraged me to search out poetry that used language holistically and artistically. Rather than words static on a page, the words on the page had to move, glow, invoke the senses. To encourage thought, make me laugh, make me angry. To make me. The frenetic nature of my new craving for poetry reflects itself in the kitsch and stacks of books organized in an outwardly haphazard yet carefully tender abandon. One of the highlights from my bookshelf is Derrick Harriell’s Stripper in Wonderland, an intimate exploration of time and new fatherhood in the event of birth. The book itself serves as a moment in time, a memory of the day Harriell and I talked about poetry over tacos with other poets and some of my professors. His poetry struck me in a similar way as David Bowie’s Hunky Dory: a self-contained world of thought shown sensorially through lyric. Once I read Harriell, I couldn’t stop the force that is poetry. My bookshelf gained lots of new friends to hold, plus another bookshelf to its left to share the weight.

A view of a bookshelf with horizontal stacks of books and some vertically stacked books on the far right side. There is an instant camera in its pink case resting on the shelf.

Electricity in the form of CAConrad’s While Standing In Line For Death ran throughout my entire body, and the book that joined my 2019 hoard eventually leading me to a formal practice. Marilyn Hacker’s Presentation Piece and Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne brought me in and out of bodies, of grief and of relationships; Johannes Göransson’s PILOT (“JOHANN THE CAROUSEL HORSE”) and Kim Hyesoon’s Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream revealed what happens when language is allowed to ebb and flow beyond the boundaries often placed on the written word; Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong introduced me to the erotic and often humor of a short sensorial poetics; and Ava Hoffman’s LOVE POEMS/smallness studies punched me in the face and forced my gaze upon the abilities of poetry to disintegrate structures of power and assert itself into new bodies that ask us to tag along rather than afford us any control.

I suppose it’s time for me to answer those questions from the start, though I think you already know the answers I will provide:

Yes, that is a lot of books. I don’t know if I’ll make it through all of them, but I’m certainly going to let the books that need me take me where I need to go.

and

It’s not the clown that prevents my sleep. It’s the excitement of tomorrow’s poetry that makes me a restless bedmate.

*NOTE: I would certainly be remiss to ignore the United States’ instances of clownery, past and present, used for racist caricature and the maintenance of oppression. Clowns in concept, history, and practice exist for multiple purposes, and I wholly and actively do not support any instances of clownery for the purposes of systemic racism, harmful stereotyping, and the mockery of marginalized communities.

Surrounded by blurred-out houses, fences, and grass, the author is shown from the waist up in a black compression tank with a gold septum ring and a gold nostril hoop. Their right arm contains a number of black and grey tattoos visible, including fuchsia flowers, an American Traditional snake, and an envelope with a heart seal. They have a medium-brown, wavy mullet, dark thick eyebrows, and are looking straight at the camera with a blank stare.

Jillian A. Fantin (they/them) is a poet with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow, and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of RENESME LITERARY. Jillian received BAs in English and Political Science with an emphasis in Political Theory from a small university in Birmingham, Alabama, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry and a graduate minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in American Journal of Poetry, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.

Meet Our New Intern: Anna-Quinn French

Anna-Quinn French

Anytime I am asked to give any information or details to introduce myself to new people, my answer is always, “I am nothing if not a sensitive, hopeless romantic”. For as long as my memory goes back, I can remember being drawn to anything teeming with self expression, curiosity, and love. With a brother four years older and a sister two years older, my life consisted of tagging along or performing absurd made up plays and dances for my family. My siblings nurtured and protected this artistic part of me, most likely because watching your youngest sister make a fool out of herself is free entertainment, and supported all of the wild products that stemmed from this unbridled creativity. Whether it was attempts at fantasy short stories, songwriting, auditioning for the school band, or desire to act in our school plays, my siblings and parents were applauding my efforts every step of the way. 

Around the time I entered my teenage years, my once unflinching confidence was being threatened by growing feelings of self doubt and insecurity; the beauty of being a teenage girl. These overwhelming feelings seemed to elucidate an obvious truth I had been ignoring. Despite my continuous efforts in varying arts, I was not really good at any of them. I had dipped my toes in repeatedly, testing the waters of all the different artistic pools, but none of them seemed to feel good enough for me to dive right in. This realization hit me like a cartoon piano falling on an oblivious passerby; I didn’t really have an art or creative outlet to proudly identify myself with, even after years of trying. 

I finally discovered my place artistically when I was 13. One day when I was in the 7th grade, my brother came home from school and walked into my sister and I’s shared room with his laptop propped open on his forearm. With a nervous energy radiating off of him, he slowly lowered the screen down to my bed and said he wanted to give me something. The top of the Google Doc pulled up on his screen read, “An Ode to my Sister”. While I had read some poems before this occurrence, usually for assignments in school, never had I received one that was about me or was filled with the kind of words that immediately produce tears and a burn in your throat. I was unaware of the power that poetry possessed until then, and after witnessing how much it touched me emotionally, I saw a way to release my desire to create and produce some form of art. 

I began writing as much as I could from that moment. While a lot of my early poems are impossible for me to read now out of sheer embarrassment, they still reveal the emotions and sentiments of what it is like to be a confused teenager who wants nothing more than to feel a part of something important and special. Poetry introduced me to a world that did not shy away from painful vulnerability or sensitivity, but rather embraced it. Getting to be a part of the Sundress team is an opportunity I craved when I was younger, so I feel nothing but gratitude and excitement to be where I am today. I am hopeful that more opportunities like this will come my way in the future, but for right now, I am thrilled to be in an environment that loves the art as much as I do.

Meet Our New Intern: Nicole Bethune Winters

A photo of Nicole, a white woman with blonde hair, wearing a sweatshirt and resting on a fence at sunset overlooking the ocean.

Growing up, when I wasn’t running around barefoot outside, you could find me reading, writing, or in the midst of a very messy art project—and to be honest, not much has changed. Two decades later, I’m still writing voraciously, and end most days splattered in clay. My creative life is fuelled by adventuring into the wild and connecting to the environment around me, and I pursue that inspiration without abandon every chance I get.

Creative expression has long been a vital part of who I am as a human, but when I first graduated from college, I was a little lost. I went from being in this beautiful creative incubator with safe spaces to get vulnerable, collaborate with other artists, and receive constructive criticism, to being very alone in that practice. But, something about moving to California felt like moving back into that incubator. Within a year and a half of moving to San Diego, my first collection of poetry was accepted for publication, and my pottery business was thriving. It definitely didn’t happen overnight, but I finally landed in a place where I could bloom.

Moving west woke up a piece of my soul that had been lying dormant for far too long. Surrounded by a vast variety of accessible and gorgeous new landscapes, I developed a strong pull towards the outdoors. I have always been a beach kid, but every time I jet off on a camping trip, I find more of myself in the mountains and desert. Being fully immersed in nature is what gets me going. I feel alive out there, and leaning into that has been huge for my creative work. I began carving the landscapes I fell in love with on my pottery, and writing them into poetry, and felt my pieces begin to connect with people on a different level.

That connection is something I have chased since I graduated college, and my ultimate dream is to find a niche in the editorial world that allows me the capacity to travel, while providing the opportunity to connect with a greater community of fellow writers. I am jazzed to work for Sundress Publications, and to have the opportunity to immerse myself in the world of publishing while helping foster a space for others to share their work.

Nicole Bethune Winters is a poet, ceramic artist, and yoga teacher. She currently resides in Southern California, where she makes and sells pottery out of her home studio. When she isn’t writing or wheel-throwing, Nicole is likely at the beach, on a trail, or exploring new landscapes. She derives most of the inspiration for her creative work from her interactions with the environment around her, and is always looking for new ways to connect with and understand the earth. Her debut poetry collection, brackish, will be published by Finishing Line Press in August 2022.

Meet Our New Intern: Emory Night

Settling into wanting to do something has not come easily to me. I know a lot of people who would say the same, but coming into my fifth year of college has made me reckon with that fact. I have had to examine everything about me, from where I come from to where I want to go to who I want to be. I looked back at my childhood, my teenage years, and tried to find something, anything, that would point me in some direction.

Everything always seemed to lead itself back to writing. 

As a child, I was the kid who made the worlds we played in. I was the kid who helped people develop wild backstories, who helped people feel seen in their roles in what we played. I was the one writing “lyrics” for the band that my cousins and I were totally going to start. I was that middle schooler who wrote fanfiction and always had a notebook to just jot something, anything, down whenever I could. In high school I took advanced English classes, studied musical composition in relation to the written word, worked in the school’s library in the morning, and wrote essay after essay about what I wanted to do for college.

It’s funny to think that in those essays I was writing about becoming a kinesiologist. That, of course, didn’t last. Before orientation, I had already changed my major to public relations, something I was absolutely fascinated with. I saw it as an opportunity to use my voice and have an impact and was so excited for it. First semester of sophomore year, I realized that it wasn’t quite right. I wanted to help people and PR didn’t really seem like the best way for me to do that. I switched around a lot of communications majors until switching to psychology. It felt closer to what I wanted to do, but nothing really clicked until I switched to English.

It feels obvious looking back. Of course the best way to use my voice and help people would be through English, through writing. Questioning what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, has led me to this most amazing place in my life where I am finally recognizing what I want. I wish I could take credit for this realization, but honestly it was my friends who noticed it before I did. Part of that is why I am here in the first place. If I had not had others to lift me up, I would still be unhappily working towards a degree that didn’t suit me. Community is always something I want to strive to participate in and create. Being here means that I get to do both.

Emory Night is currently studying at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They plan to graduate with a BA in English and a minor in secondary education. They are an intern with The Jones Center for Leadership and Service and read regularly with Writers Block, a writing club at the University of Tennessee.

Meet Our New Intern: Saoirse

A brown femme person with shoulder length black har sitting at a table. They have a drink in their hand and a butterfly tattoo in pride colors is visible on their wrist.

I grew up in a family of six people and four languages. We also moved around quite a lot. Between code switching at home and learning a new dialect with every move to a different city, I learned the power of language pretty quickly. So it was no surprise when I started poking my nose in my parents’ book collection as a child. Always being the new kid in school and being bullied constantly only made me retreat into my books even more.

Not the best idea—according to my teachers, at least. Books can plant the darnedest ideas in your head. They can suggest your school textbooks are sexist and problematic. They can tell you it’s okay—gasp—even healthy, to be your full queer self. They can instill in you a revolutionary zeal. My books got me in quite a lot of trouble—trouble I took as a sign that I was doing something right.

Though I had a habit of juggling languages based on my mood in both my reading and writing, English held a mysterious allure for me. It was the language where I found my identity as a queer nonbinary woman and it was also a legacy of the colonial violence that separated by grandparents from their ancestral lands. I was proud to be articulate in a language that could never articulate its own violence upon my lived reality. It was to understand this fraught relationship that I found myself majoring in English at Washington College on the eastern shore of Maryland.

Washington College, particularly the pedagogical brilliance of Drs. Kimberly Andrews and Alisha Knight, allowed me to come into my own as a writer and a thinker. It was also where I discovered my passion for editing. Over the years, I’ve harnessed that passion into working with emerging writers who don’t necessarily have access to a creative writing workshop. To that end, I founded Palimpsest—a writers collective focused on honing our craft in community with each other. I also serve as a Guest Editor at Oyster River Pages, where I inaugurated the Emerging Voices in Poetry program as well as ORP Schools— our creative writing workshops. These are all an attempt to create spaces that center the creativity of historically excluded folks.

Language is power harnessed through story. There is no ecstasy greater than finding a story that disrupts, enhances, and challenges the trends at any given time and place. And no honor greater than working with the writer to help them achieve precise muscularity of language as they tell their story. That is why I am so very honored to join Sundress Publications in the curation of a diverse and vibrant literary landscape.

Saoirse’s name and passion are the same: freedom. As an exophonic writer, their academic interests revolve around linguistic power dynamics, especially in connection to the land. They are always trying to write, and find, poetry that breaks the English language into articulating its own colonial violence. They are a freelance editor and serve as the Guest Editor for Emerging Voices in Poetry at Oyster River Pages. They are a 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a finalist for the Sophie Kerr Prize. They find excitement in travel, comfort in a good cup of coffee, and love in their newly adopted puppy, Malaika. Find them at saoirseedits.com or on Twitter @saoirseedits.

Meet Our New Intern: Kathryn Davis

I’ve never been big on football, but I’ve always loved books. Between my third-grade and seventh-grade years, the oldest of my two brothers played college football nine hours away from home, and my parents resolved to attend every. Single. Game. We’d wake up at four or five each Saturday morning, load into my dad’s Ford Explorer without a word to one another, and we’d drive. 

During the first couple hours of those drives, it’d be too dark to read—but around seven or eight, I’d start in. The librarians in town had known me for a while by then (my general book habit was nothing new), but they began to learn the football season drill as well. They’d ask where Joe was playing that week. How many hours away? Twelve? How many of these (gesturing vaguely at the pile of books I’d pulled off the shelves to take with me) do you think you’ll finish by next weekend? All of them? See you next week. 

I’d read from that first light until we parked and headed into the game. We’d settle into the bleachers. Then I’d start again. About halfway through Joe’s college football career, a teammate of his said to him, “Joe—I didn’t realize you had a sister. What does she look like?” Another teammate interjected, “A book cover.” 

I went to college years later in hopes of making books, because there will always be more long drives, more library trips, more football games. In college, I led my university’s literary journal, fishladder, while pursuing a degree in Creative Writing—while writing bad stories and worse poems and working with great writers. I had just about the greatest and luckiest college experience a young writer can have. 

The bad thing about this fact, though, is that the writing life beyond college does not necessarily feature regular three-hour discussions of short stories, debates about line breaks, or exhausting and wonderful workshops. There are long and difficult work days that mean the writing never gets done. There are lots and lots of Submittable rejections and bills to pay. On roadtrips, I’m now expected to put down my books and help drive. All that said, I’m so, so excited to have arrived at this internship with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. I feel like I’m sneaking more time in the backseat of my dad’s Explorer, lucking into more time to draft a story that’s almost-there. I’m so honored to be trusted to help uplift Sundress’s incredible writers’ voices, to play a small role in fostering a community of folks who’d rather hang out behind a book cover than watch the game.

Meet Our New Intern: Sydney Peay

Image of Sydney Peay wearing a pink coat, a pink beret, and glasses, and standing with a cane

Growing up, I always had a passion for reading and telling stories. One of my teachers said I always knew how to entertain myself, and it was because I always had a book in my hand or a story in my head. I loved to tell myself stories each day, and when I got to middle school, I started to write them down. I kept writing until my junior year of high school, when my AP English class made me realize that I enjoyed reading and analyzing fiction far more than I enjoyed writing it. At the same time, I started taking art classes and began dreaming of a career as an animator, using art to tell beautiful stories. I also developed a passion for social justice, as I advocated for the rights of LGBT people at my school.

Yet, when colleges asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said I wanted to study chemistry with the goal of developing psychiatric medications. While I did genuinely enjoy studying chemistry, there was no passion there. I just wanted to choose a career that would help me earn money, and I didn’t think I would get that with literature, art, or social justice.

In March of my senior year, I was invited to interview for the Haslam Scholars Program at the University of Tennessee, where I gladly peddled my story about a passion for studying chemistry until, during one of the events, a speaker asked us “What do you imagine your ideal self doing?” I started sobbing, because I couldn’t picture my ideal self, but I knew I couldn’t dedicate my career to chemistry. That night, I told my mom that I was going to attend the University of Tennessee and change my major.

I ended up changing my major to sociology, even though I honestly wasn’t sure what sociology was. I found that I enjoyed the program when I arrived at UT, but I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. It wasn’t until I took my first university English class that I realized that what I was missing was the thrill that analyzing stories provided. There was something so special to me about stories and the way they work, and I missed the feeling of close reading, developing an argument, and writing an analysis. It was that spring that I decided to major in English literature.

I have spent the rest of my time at UT studying the intersection between literature and social theory. My thesis project is going to be a podcast dedicated to analyzing the sociological messages of science fiction films and texts, with a focus on how authors and directors use literary techniques to develop social commentary in their work. I am going to continue studying this intersection of literature and social theory when I pursue my masters of library sciences after I graduate.

I am so excited to learn more about the innovative and progressive work that Sundress Publications does, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share this work as the social media intern.

Sydney Peay is a senior at the University of Tennessee pursuing a BA in sociology and English Literature. In addition to managing the social media for Sundress Publications, they manage the social media for the Voices Out Loud Project, an LGBTQ+ archive of East Tennessee.

Meet Our New Intern: Natalie Metropulos

Napa, California

My parents grew up poor. Dad’s situation was such that, on some nights, the only dinner option was a can of pineapples. Mom’s seven-member family lived in a two-bedroom house where she shared a cramped room with her four sisters. When these are your stories, money is everything.

Dad quit high school to support himself. My parents married before they were 20, and Dad worked day and night in the residential building industry to change the course of what would otherwise have been a poverty-stricken future. Mom made sure the money he brought home would get us through the industry’s busy warm months as well as the slower cold ones.

They made an exceptional team, providing a comfortable middle-class life for my three siblings and I. They also instilled in us a strong work ethic, ensured we were college-educated, and impressed upon us the importance of obtaining jobs we could be proud of. And of course, they wanted us to be paid well.

In 1998, when Hearst Publishing offered me an unpaid internship in New York City upon graduation from Penn State, my parents were perplexed. I remember the anger twisting Dad’s clenched jaw. He viewed a college degree as a golden ticket. People with college degrees didn’t work for free.

I turned down the internship. Ultimately, I became a lawyer.

For a long time, I thought that my parent’s unwillingness to support me financially so I could take an unpaid internship prevented me from pursuing a career I would have thrived in and loved. But I’ve come to understand that what I needed wasn’t so much money as it was validation. I needed someone to tell me that the fact that Hearst wasn’t going to pay me didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be doing something of value, or that I wouldn’t be valued. When money is woven into your being from birth as the only legitimate measure of professional success, it’s hard to see how value can be measured in other ways.

It took me more than twenty years to decide that, for me, financial compensation isn’t a reliable measurement for the significance of my experience or contribution. I think I have motherhood to thank for helping me finally come to that realization. I don’t get paid a penny for being a mother, but I see the results of the time and dedication I put into my job, and I’m pretty happy with my compensation package. 

Six months ago, I walked off the partnership path at a highly regarded Big Law firm to find the road I stumbled off of in 1998. I look back to the moment when I turned from that road and realize that I didn’t need money, I needed bravery and ingenuity. Now I’m pursuing a new version of a career I envisioned for myself when I was 20, glad for the opportunity to be an unpaid Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. At 43, I finally feel brave enough and clever enough to be here.

Natalie Metropulos holds a BA in English from the Pennsylvania State University and a JD from Duquesne University. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. Although it has been a long time since Metropulos’ writing has appeared outside of a legal document, she has been published (nee Natalie Rieland) in Kalliope, Research/Penn State Magazine, and Pitt Magazine. Metropulos writes fiction and narrative non-fiction for children and adults.

Meet our New Intern: Nicole Drake

Lonely kids make the best creatives, I hear.  We play with dolls and direct the drama of their complex inner lives; we talk to ourselves; we read and read and read and read.

I grew up, homeschooled, in a tiny town in Illinois, current population 1,977.  My whole world could have fit inside a thimble. By the time I turned 15, I had read 362 books.  I jotted notes for stories down in the margins, half-cast scenes in the spaces between chapters.

I was lucky: my world didn’t stay small forever. A few years and a move to Florida later, I was applying to colleges, an impending major in writing or linguistics ahead of me, and found out I was accepted to a program that would have me move to Europe for a year. Specifically, Italy. My grandma called my mom four times in the span of two days to tell her that “She does know that they speak a different language there, doesn’t she?” and “How is she going to get there, is she going to fly by herself?”

I, despite my grandmothers expectations, made it there alive and continue to be alive to this day.

What living in another culture taught me is how expansive the world is. Writing, for me, has always been about expression. We write and read in the languages we have grown up in, that wrap cozily around us like blankets. But expression changes when it’s filtered through other mediums, through the half-garbled words of a language you’ve only just started piecing together, or through the stories of someone who has lived a life totally opposite to your own. We take for granted our perspective, our insular reality. But there’s a whole world out there.

I moved back to the states for the last three years of my degree at Florida State University. I took as many unique literature classes and writing workshops as I could cram in my schedule. I developed a passion for Post-Colonial literature and other genres that tell the stories of historically underrepresented groups. I was diagnosed with the type of illness I would never recover from. Despite that, I kept living. I graduated with a degree in creative writing, triumphant and exhausted.

In the year since, I have had so much opportunity to grow. I pursued my passion for books and publishing by serving as the Fiction Intern for the Southeast Review, which allowed me to channel the hard-won literary skills I gained in school into something tangible. I taught Argentine Tango for a scientific study focussing on tango’s effects on patients with Parkinson’s disease, and got to see the continual progress of each patient who, the day before, had said that they could never do that impossible thing. I’ve worked as a Social Media Manager for a tattoo shop, and trained others on my team in new skills that even a few months ago, I thought were impossible.

All of that has, gloriously, lead me here. It has been a year of never-ending expansion, and I am so grateful that I will have the ability to bring that growth as well as my passion for words to Sundress Publications.

Nicole Drake is a graduate of Florida State University with a BA in Creative Writing. She has served as a reader for the Southeast Review and the Seven Hills Review, and currently works as the Social Media Manager for Capital City Tattoo’z. She teaches dance and works her way through her endless “To Read” list in her spare time.