From Bookselling to Book Reviews
Happy New Year! As I was thinking about my time at Waldenbooks last month, I got to thinking about calendars. During the holiday season at the mall back in the ‘90s, bookstore employees took requisite turns outside the store at the calendar kiosk.
The calendar kiosk was exactly what you’d imagine it to be: a temporary stand erected at the beginning of December out in the middle of one of the mall corridors to sell only wall calendars, desk calendars, and a smattering of planners. I would stand out there for a full shift, doing laps around the kiosk to keep an eye on the wares, people-watching in my boredom between sales, and really just wishing I was back in the bookstore instead . . . with the books!
Let’s just say it was my least favorite duty during my time at Waldenbooks. But the calendars themselves, I have nothing against.
If I do a quick count currently, I have 3 digital calendars (all synced of course), 2 wall calendars (a little less synced), and am now a proud owner of 1 Big A## Calendar (with hopes to get better synced with my husband and our yearly family goals).
I start here in this next installment of my journey to book editor because we’ve all just gotten through a month of holidays, welcomed in a new year, and, well, my past calendars can help me track said journey.
If I were to look at my calendar from the year 2000, I would find college graduation in June. I departed my job at Waldenbooks and left Western Washington University with a major in Psychology, a minor in English, and a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) certificate. I headed north to Skagway, Alaska, that summer to work as a tour guide (the second of three summers total). On my 2003 calendar, January–March was blocked out for a 3-month backcountry expedition in Patagonia, Chile, with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). At this point I was admittedly trying to find my way in the world and toying with the idea of being an outdoor educator.
After my NOLS course (kayaking and mountaineering), I worked for a few years back in Alaska as a bilingual tutor for the Anchorage School District, and during one of the summers between school years I was working for the local NOLS Alaska branch and discovered there was a 6-month Editorial Internship position opening up at NOLS headquarters in Lander, Wyoming. I applied, was hired, and penciled into January on my 2006 calendar: drive from Anchorage to Lander to start NOLS internship.
So it was a bit of a circuitous route from Waldenbooks to NOLS over six years, but I had realized by this point that what I enjoyed most was working with writers and words. I combined my love of books and stories with the enjoyment of tutoring ESL writing students and a passion for the outdoors.
Over the first half of 2006 I threw myself into the internship position for NOLS Publications in their Marketing Department. I was writing for their alumni newsletter The Leader, learning how print publications were designed and sent to press, and contributing to editing the numerous other publications that helped market their courses.
Serendipitously, one of my very first assignments at my internship was a book review of Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches by Jill Fredston, a fellow search and rescue member back in Alaska. She was of the old guard, and I the new guard, so I hadn’t gotten to know her personally, but I was thrilled to connect my two worlds through this assignment.
I wrote:
With over 20 years in the field of avalanche forecasting and safety education, Jill Fredston’s new book Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches (Harcourt, 2005) goes beyond the technical aspects of avalanche science to the heart of the matter—human nature.
From her personal relationship with her husband and business partner, Doug Fesler (codirector of the Alaska Avalanche Safety Center and cofounder of the Alaska Avalanche School), to her fascination with the intricacies of snowpack, Snowstruck is indeed a love story, a story of passion for life and the sometimes precarious role we play in our own fate. Readers will be awestruck by Fredston’s fervent retelling of lives pock-marked by avalanche debris, including her own.
I still highly recommend this book if you spend any time in the winter backcountry. But I digress.
The other great part of my NOLS gig was getting familiar with their backlist of book titles and their relationship with their publisher, Stackpole Books. After my internship was up in June 2006, I already had on my calendar in July the Denver Publishing Institute (DPI), a four-week graduate-level program exposing participants to all the different roles in the book publishing industry. So as my internship wound to a close and I set my sights just south of Wyoming to Colorado, but I knew I wasn’t done with NOLS or their books.
Stay tuned for next week! I’ll describe my takeaways from DPI and how I found my way back to NOLS by the end of 2006.
In the meantime, subscribe below and then leave me a comment with what the theme of your 2024 wall calendar is! Or, tell me if you’re a digital-only scheduler these days.