Tristan Whalen ’22

Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA

This summer I interned at a small, independent literary press in North Adams called Tupelo Press. Located in the Historic Norad Mill, Tupelo’s two small offices are home to every step of the publishing process: from reading and editing manuscripts to packaging and mailing finished books. Tupelo publishes beautiful books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as a quarterly digital journal. They run the 30/30 program, an innovative fundraiser in which volunteer poets write a poem every day for 30 days, generating donations from sponsors. For twenty years, Tupelo has been a hub for literary activity in the Berkshires and has published a wide range of diverse voices and exemplifies the best of what publishing can be, with its unwavering commitment to art before profit (in great contrast to the behemoth super-commercial publishing houses in New York). Tupelo’s small permanent staff includes an operations manager, a managing editor, a marketing associate and an artistic director, my supervisor, Jeffrey Levine. During this internship, albeit in ways I may not have expected, I learned so much about the technical, complicated and sometimes brutal process of getting published.

I did not quite know the extent of my internship duties until I arrived at Tupelo in early June. I was under the impression that my work this summer would include an assortment of garden-variety publishing tasks: sending emails, connecting with authors, learning about book distribution, maybe even reading manuscripts. I was wrong. Over the course of 10 weeks, my internship duties settled into three main projects: developing content for social media, building the Tupelo bookstore, and rejecting manuscripts.

Within a week of my internship’s start, I learned that the Press was planning to open a bookstore on location in the Norad Mill. Jeffrey asked me if I would help him set it up, and thus began the first significant project of the summer. Over the next five weeks, I learned a few things about creating a bookstore from scratch. The first step in this process was to collect and categorize the many hundreds of books in Jeffrey’s personal collection, integrating them with the scores of new books from Tupelo’s storeroom. The books that would eventually comprise the shop included a vast and desperate array of poetry, fiction, memoir, and non-fiction. After sorting through all of these books, I began shelving strategically, careful to leave space on the shelves for new books that might come in. In the process of building this bookstore, I flipped through hundreds of pages of ever-intriguing books, became familiar with sub-genres I never knew existed, and fell in love with authors I had never read. That being said, if by some strange chance I end up setting up another bookstore, I will certainly have plenty of mistakes to learn from.

Perhaps the longest and most serious project I was assigned to was developing content for the Press’s social media accounts. This, although exciting, was daunting, as I had to be ever-attentive to Tupelo-related updates from the literary world: announcements of awards, deadline submission dates, interviews with Tupelo authors all became relevant and necessary to my work. I developed a posting schedule, did relevant research, and began interacting with other small literary press through social media. By the end of my internship, Tupelo’s Instagram had nearly twice as many followers and much stronger collective engagement with our content. Jeffrey offered to pay me part-time through the next year for the social media work I was doing. I accepted, and have continued to enjoy developing content for Tupelo.

Towards the end of my time at Tupelo, I was given the job sending out rejection letters to the authors whose work we had turned down over the last year. In order to personalize the letters, I ended up reading sections of a number of poetry and fiction manuscripts. Although many of these works captivated me and drew me in in disparate, novel ways, they will likely never get published. Turning down generative, creative work doesn’t feel great, but it has offered me a more realistic understanding of how this process works: much more than simply the literary quality of a manuscript is considered when a publisher decides which projects to undergo. Moving forward, Jeffrey has hired me to continue doing this work, too.

Initially, I was excited to work at Tupelo because I felt that its small size presented a rare opportunity to get my hands into every angle of the publishing business. As a likely English and philosophy major, I felt that this internship would put me in a position to be constantly learning about things I love. Having completed this internship, I can confirm that I was interested for all the right reasons, but the experiences I had were not as unidirectional as I initially thought. For one, I did not expect to have a hand in the marketing/advertising aspect of publishing, and I am grateful to have been newly exposed to the intersections between literary craft and graphic design throughout the business. In becoming familiar with the delicate and well-groomed aesthetic of Tupelo’s brand (and trying to update and improve it with new content) I learned how to use principles of design to amplify the impact of literary work: in advertising a new book, in promoting a literary event, etc. As a passionate humanities student deeply involved with creative production on campus, I find myself more interested in getting involved with the college’s own news and literary publications and finding a way to apply my recent experience with marketing and social media.

In summation, I would like to sincerely thank the Kraft Family for giving me this opportunity to learn so much in such an energized and exciting environment. I am elated to be continuing my work with Tupelo throughout the next year.