Zoe Eng & Cole Chaudhari, spring 2024 interns
This spring, Zoe Eng and Cole Chaudhari spent their Wednesday mornings and Thursday afternoons in the New England Review office. They organized and hosted an event for our new student reading series, read paper submissions, interviewed authors from issue 45.1, and created original content for the web. Here they interview each other for our “Meet the Interns” series.
Cole Chaudhari: Welcome to Meet the Interns spring 2024 edition! I’m Cole.
Zoe Eng: I’m Zoe! I guess we can jump right into it. Who are you? Give our readers some background information about how you ended up at Middlebury and what else you do here.
CC: I’m a sophomore English and History double major, and I came to Middlebury because it’s such a beautiful place, and it was the perfect size for me. It had all of the academic things I wanted and a lot of the extracurricular things I wanted. My primary extracurricular is that I’m a member of The Campus newspaper, which takes up a lot of my time. I play a couple instruments on campus, which is fun, and spend a lot of time at Davis Library.
ZE: I’m a film major with a double minor in English (creative writing track) and French. And I’m a senior, so I’m graduating very soon from Middlebury. I’m a Posse Scholar, so Middlebury was kind of the straight path. But generally speaking, I wanted a school with a liberal arts education, because I had no idea what I wanted to do. And Middlebury was a good place for that. I would say the biggest extracurricular I do is Evolution, which is a dance crew on campus. I do a lot of dancing with Evo, and I take ballet classes as well.
CC: Alright, here’s a very literary question: If you had to pick four books to bring with you on a desert island, what books would they be?
ZE: This is a hard one. I’m notoriously bad at these types of questions. I’m gonna think it over. Do you have an answer?
CC: Yes, I do. I would bring Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen. I’m only going to do novels. I’d also bring Beloved by Toni Morrison, Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner.
ZE: Okay, I guess these are just the four off the top of my head, but because you mentioned Toni Morrison, my favorite book in high school was The Bluest Eye. My picks are all blue related! [Laughing] I really like Bluets by Maggie Nelson and Return by Emily Lee Luan. And then for my last one, I don’t know . . . I’m trying to think of a book I really liked when I was young, maybe something like Madeleine. It’s a children’s book and I think it would be nice to have.
Our next question requires more naming: Name your top three albums, two films, and one TV show.
CC: Okay, my three albums would be Continuum by John Mayer, Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon and . . . OK Computer by Radiohead. My two films would be Drive My Car and Arrival. And my TV show would be the first season of True Detective, because it’s amazing. It was written by a novelist and has some of the best writing I’ve ever seen on screen. I love it.
ZE: Dang! I told you, I’m not good at these . . . I feel like I listen to lots of individual songs but not full albums. I will say, I did have a big Phoebe Bridgers phase, so maybe Punisher. This is not an album, but I listened to Teresa Tan’s song “Tian Mi Mi” a lot when I was younger. That would be a very nostalgic pick. Third album, gosh, I don’t know. Let’s say Patched Up by beabadoobee. And then my two films are The Florida Project—which I’ve talked to you about—and . . . Ponyo? Yeah. My TV show would be Adventure Time. I’m learning that I’m a very nostalgic person.
CC: Pivoting to our New England Review questions now. Zoe, why did you choose this internship?
ZE: Honestly, I chose this internship because I pursued creative writing pretty late in my college career. I wish I got into it earlier. So, special shoutout to our shared professor, Karin Gottshall, for putting me on in her Structure of Poetry class. Ever since I took that class, I’ve been really leaning into my English and creative writing side. And I just think NER is so cool! I hadn’t had any editorial or publishing experience, so I thought it would be really fulfilling, and I’m very glad that I have it now. What about you, Cole? Why did you choose NER?
CC: I chose NER because I really wanted to experience working in publishing and the business of curating a literary magazine. I wanted to do it at a place that was local and not super industrial. NER is such a legendary publication but it also feels very comforting since it’s housed on campus. It felt like a really awesome opportunity. And yeah, any way to get immersed in more literary things is a joy for me. This internship has been really cool. So, what do some of your tasks look like around the NER office?
ZE: Okay, well, a lot of WordPress work. A lot! But you know what? It’s kind of nice. Once you get used to it, it’s easy to make posts. We also planned a student reading event, which was very cool. Reading paper submissions too. It varies day to day. What about you, Cole?
CC: One highlight has been organizing the student reading event and getting community members involved—friends and even professors. I also enjoyed communicating with NER authors, like in our forthcoming Behind the Byline interviews. You’re able to actually talk to the writers whose work you really enjoy, which is not a privilege you usually get otherwise. And then a lot of it is helping out with administrative tasks, like working on contracts and making sure everything is signed. Organizing files and putting things into databases. You really do a lot of different types of work.
ZE: It’s so interesting to see, working with Carolyn and Leslie, the whole process behind the scenes. I think there’s a lot of work that goes into creating NER that you wouldn’t know at first glance. Walking into the office in the morning and seeing a spread of potential cover art for the upcoming issue is so cool. And hearing their conversations and the back and forth about little and big decisions, like with the new website redesign . . . It’s so interesting to hear their thought processes.
CC: Yes! One thing I want to add is that Carolyn and Leslie take you seriously as an intern. They really value your feedback when it comes to making substantial decisions about how NER functions, or different aesthetic choices the magazine wants to make. And you know, reading submissions is a big part of the job and we’re allowed to assess them as if we were editors. In fact, we’re encouraged to make our own judgments and evaluate them on their literary merit. And that’s a big task.
ZE: Is there anything in particular that you’re gonna miss moving forward?
CC: We both come in Wednesday mornings and Thursday afternoons, and I don’t have classes on Friday. So it feels like I really end my week in the NER office. That’s been really cozy, because I know that once I’m at the end of my week, I’m in a quiet, comfortable place where I don’t have to worry about work for a little bit. What about you?
ZE: Yeah, besides Cinder (office manager Mary Heather’s dog), who I’m going to miss dearly, the space! I remember when I walked in for my interview, I was so surprised. And my friends who went to the student reading event said the same thing too, because they never expected it to be so cozy. It’s so unassuming in the middle of campus. You would never know that it’s such a beautiful space.