5+1 Postdoctoral Fellow David Carlson writes about his time as an acquisitions intern with the press earlier in the spring and over the summer. In working alongside the acquisitions team and helping authors through the peer review process, he reflects on the role of a university press in supporting academics and sharing knowledge with the world and how everyone at the Press steps up to fulfill that goal.
I first met our director, Steve Wrinn, on the recommendation of my advisor. I had wanted to explore the feasibility of a publishing career. In our first meeting, Steve said to me the same kinds of things he says to everyone, and would therefore, I think, be familiar to anyone who has known Steve for more than a few minutes. He began almost immediately to try his best to dispel any sense of romance I might have about publishing. If he had a dollar for every person he meets who prattles on about how much they love books et cetera et cetera, love of books is not enough, publishing is a business, and so on and so on.
Steve repeats these things to convey severity, but I find it hard to say how seriously anyone listening takes him. I say that because, in almost the same breath, he invariably pivots to speaking about the great pride he takes in his work and the work of the Press and of his colleagues. He speaks of the position of academic publishers to provide a service to the academy and to posterity, to contribute to great conversations and great scholarship, and of the meticulous, high caliber work that his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame Press consistently produce to great professional and personal satisfaction–even, dare I say, joy. Betraying, perhaps, his insistence on the romanceless-ness of his career, he often describes academic publishing as a calling.
I do think he sells the romance a little short. Working in publishing is certainly work, but it does carry a certain romance about it that I did not find, for example, in my past life tracking on-time-delivery metrics for the military industrial complex. True, reading books does not fill one’s entire day, but engaging with ideas certainly constitutes a significant portion of this enterprise. Working in publishing is, in fact, a way of living the life of the mind, and I do think there is a romance in that.
But I think the closest that I came to feeling like publishing could be a calling—that it could be deeper and more significant than romance, and that the books that presses put into the world do matter—hit me when I worked on Tia Noelle Pratt’s forthcoming book Black and Catholic: Racism, Identity, and Religion. Tia works over at Villanova University as a professor of sociology and as their Assistant VP and Director of Mission Engagement and Strategic Initiatives. Black and Catholic grew out of her research which wrestles, as the title implies, with the experiences of Black Catholics in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States. Tia’s work contributes to a growing appreciation among scholars of Black history and religious history in the United States of the existence and experiences of Black American Catholics. The book tackles some difficult topics, and the prose simultaneously reads as uncompromising and yet—and yet—how to say it? The book does not compromise, but with an uncompromisingness of love, for the community and the faith. I find it hard to describe. When the book comes out you can read it for yourself and, if you have the eyes to see, you will perhaps take my meaning.
The Press first brought me on part-time to cover one of our editors’ leave, and Pratt’s manuscript and several others fell into my lap over the course of my duties as an acquisitions intern. I helped guide the manuscript through peer review and revision, then compiled the manuscript to pass along to our editorial and production team. My support mainly consisted of answering Tia’s questions or connecting her to people who could. When Tia’s acquiring editor for the Press returned from leave, I passed the project back on and moved on to other projects.
I felt then and now—accurately—a sense mainly of the incredibly modest nature of my contribution to the larger work. Precisely for this reason—and I feel silly even saying so—I was genuinely shocked when the final manuscript arrived and I saw my name in the acknowledgements! Suddenly I was faced for the first time in black and white print that I had (in my very small way) contributed to this project, that I helped this book come into the world.
Here again I will struggle to convey the sensation. This varies from press to press and editor to editor, but my experience in acquisitions has been one marked by a light touch. One guides the projects, but the creative decisions and the creative work belong to the author, and their scholarship and their voice absolutely take center. Even so, we do play our role in getting these voices out in the world, in making them available to scholarly communities and general readers. Through my humble experience with this manuscript, with aiding this particular voice in getting out into the world, I felt for the first time a little warmth of that pride and that joy that our director radiates over the work of this academic press.