NYC & Publishing

Laura responded to my invitation to direct my blog with a question about why I moved to New York City and got into publishing after college.

Really, there was never a question to me about moving to New York. For the first part of my childhood my family lived in Rutherford, NJ, a bona fide New York suburb. You could see the skyline from some spots, we were so close. And with the exception of one trip in to see the balloons being inflated for the Thanksgiving Day Parade I don't remember us going into the city at all. So it was always a presence and yet not at all part of our lives.

At this time my family was very good friends with our neighbors across the street. Richard Michael was my sister's age and they became fast friends; I baby sat his younger sister Kara. Their parents, Mickey and Richard, were former wannabe actors, and had hilarious stories about their days as extras on set in the city that all sounded amazing to me. The stories that Mickey told, in particular, made me want to be there; it just sounded like the coolest place on earth.

I still wanted to get there when it came time to apply for colleges, so I applied to NYU. Meanwhile, my friend April, heart set on Cornell for herself, planned a trip to Ithaca, NY, and I went along for the ride. April stayed true to Cornell, but something about Ithaca College felt right to me, and it became the second school I applied to. I got accepted to both and lured into second trips to each, my dad stepping up for the long rides from Vermont (where my family had moved when I was in middle school) both times. I did an overnight stay at NYU with a current student, part of a weekend-long event the university held to get admitted kids to commit. The experience was fine, but I never really clicked with the girl I stayed with and I didn't love any of the other prospective students I met that weekend. When Dad I went back to Ithaca, it just felt right. There was nothing tangibly better about the Ithaca day; if anything, NYU rolled out more of a red carpet. The vibe at Ithaca College felt better, though, and after those trips there wasn't much of a decision to be made. I knew I wanted to go to Ithaca.

I loved it there and quickly found myself more enamored with my writing classes, writing professors, and job as a writing tutor than with anything else I was doing academically. Publishing seemed like an industry that would keep writing front and center and would feed my love for books.

I still felt drawn to know New York, though. By this time my parents had split up and my mom was living back in New Jersey, half an hour outside the city again. I was able to stay with her during the summers and did an internship at Simon & Schuster during one of them. One of the cool things about interning at such a montrously huge company was that they had a really organized internship program including weekly presentations with people in various roles within the company. I learned about children's publishing most, since that was the division I was with, but I also got a tiny taste of publicity, audio books, the art department, and every other part of publishing. It seemed cool enough.

Senior year I toyed with the idea of doing something completely different for a year and was accepted as an English teacher in Japan with the JET Program. I chickened out, though, and preferred the idea of moving to NYC. I didn't have a job lined up when I graduated, so I started that summer unemployed. It felt like I was the last one to find something. You know how you have those friends (to whom you'd never ever admit this) who just don't seem as together as you? Because those people started getting jobs before me I began freaking out even more: "If even Friend X can get a job...!?!" kind of thoughts. Plus I'd agreed to live with two other Ithaca grads (another whole story on it's own!) and we'd already found a place.

When Longman offered me a job as an editorial assistant, it was something of a relief as well as a job that I thought sounded good. It wasn't fiction publishing as I'd originally planned, but it was a job in NYC in publishing. I was naive enough to think it would actually be editorially stimulating. I ended up really liking being connected to education, though (as we all know by now) the textbook industry really wasn't for me no matter how many different hats I tried on there. Maybe fiction publishing would have been a better fit for me, but ultimately I'm glad I'm out of the industry all together. I love books but have realized that I don't need to be part of the publishing process, just like I love sushi but don't want to be a fisherman.

New York I still love, though.