My first intern assignment was to fact-check Soraya Okuda’s “The Postcards We Send: Tips for Staying Vigilant in the Information Age” in The End of Trust, issue 54 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. SWEATING, I did my best. A nonfiction piece that started out at about nineteen pages ended up with 186 footnotes. The footnotes were mostly verified facts, with some exciting errors, like how there’s actually no entity guarding the cave in One Thousand and One Nights. Fact-checking felt terrifying and complex. If you read the piece, you’ll see why.
Then, with issues 54 and 55, I discovered my latent proofreading superpowers. Cool!
Today at the office, I’m working on having compassion for myself and my fellow writers while reading submissions. The discomfort of reading something that doesn’t work in a piece hones (I hope) my sense of what does. The magic of finding a great story is humbling and exciting as hell.
Other days, I show up and do things like send mail (photos of one such adventure above), or research for book promos. All in all, it’s good to be here.