Hannah Hecht's Blog

1. Last week we didn’t have class, but instead, we went to the University of Nebraska Lincoln and visited the Love Library and the University of Nebraska Press. The meeting with Kristen at the university press proved very informative, and I’m really glad that we went. I’ve wanted to go into publishing for a while now, and, living in the Midwest, there really aren’t very many opportunities to visit a publishing company and know what they are all about. First, we got a tour of the offices and kind of learned about the process that a book and an author go through before the book hits the shelves. I thought that part was interesting because I was able to learn about all the different people who work in publishing. Then, Kristen talked to us for a while about the press and her specific job as acquisitions editor. For a while now, I’ve said that I’d like to be an editor eventually after college, but I’ve never really known what that job would entail or exactly what type of editor I’d like to be. Her description of the acquisitions editor job was really enticing. It sounds like the type of job where you do a lot more than just working with words (which I absolutely love anyway), and it sounds like you get to do a pretty big variety of things every day. Acquisitions editors have the opportunity to travel, and they spend a lot of time in communication with the authors, experts in the field, and the other people within the company. In addition, it sounded like she got to work with a large variety of different texts and that the edits that she did were broader and more contextual, rather than word-by-word and punctuation edits. She also spoke to the state of the modern publishing industry. A lot of times when I tell people that I want to go into publishing, they lament that it is a dying (or dead) industry. Kristen said that publishing really hasn’t changed all that much with new technology, nor has the press’s output. However, she did say that the industry is very competitive, and that you can’t be in it for the money.

After the University of Nebraska Press, we went to the Love Library and did some research into our final papers. I got access to some resources that I wouldn’t have been able to access at Morningside, so that was nice. Then we talked to a couple of people about their literary recovery projects. Both were very passionate, although I enjoyed the talk with the man who was working in the Cather archives the most. He made me want to read more Cather stories.

2. I’ve used up maybe more of my word count than I should have on the first point, but here goes. The novel that we read for this week was Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. I absolutely loved this book. It kind of reminded me of Ann Petry’s The Street, which we read in Women and Literature, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The father characters in Bread Givers and The Poisonwood Bible are honestly almost the same character. Both are religiously devout and self-righteous way past the point of practicality and both mistreat their daughters and wives without realizing that they are doing it. I hate them both. One of the sister characters in The Poisonwood Bible is very similar to Mashah, as well. Both use precious family resources to feed into their own vanity. Mashah ends up getting pulled into reality as she gets older, however, while Rachel Price just grows into an even more terrible human being. The book was like The Street in that the main character can never really catch a break. Every time that you start to think that things are going well for the main character or her relatives, something awful happens. But, I guess Bread Givers ends up with a semi-happier ending, as Sara is able to break free of the awful cycle of marrying terrible men, and she’s even able to be successful (if not happy) in college.

3. The secondary texts for this week were the foreword and introduction to the book. I found the foreword the most interesting since it talked about how Alice Kessler-Harris did her literary recovery project. The foreword reminded me of a lot of the same things that the sci-fi guy (I can’t remember his name) at UNL talked about with his literary recovery project. It sounds like literary recovery projects usually begin when someone stumbles across a little-known work that they love, and then they put years and years of work into bringing the author into a brighter light. Literary recovery sounds like a bit of a thankless endeavor. The introduction paints the life of Sara Smolinsky as a semi-autobiography of Anzia Yezierska’s life.