By Audrey Chait
There is no window in the intern’s alcove where I sit at the Strothman Agency, so I generally have no idea if it’s sunny or pouring buckets. Given the summer I have spent here, it is probably misting humidly in that delightful East Coast way that inflates my hair to the size of Andrew Jackson’s. The agency is tucked away in a building full of law firms at No. 6 Beacon St., and here it has been my pleasure to be an intern at this oasis of historical fiction, food memoir, and teenage superheroes, happily discovering that there are indeed ways to make a career out of reading.
I read a lot of slush, and some pretty wild things come across my desk. Glittery query letters, missives in other languages, personal accounts of alien abduction—you name it, someone has wanted us to represent it. However, no matter how out-there or wrong for the agency, every query is written by someone who has a story to tell and believes this firmly enough to try for publication, which takes guts. Stories are intrinsically valuable even if they never appear on Amazon at a 20% discount. Told in a different format, say at a dinner party, or while stuck in an elevator, they might be spellbinding, but in the context of agenting all you have are some words on a page, sent in a Manila envelope, hopefully with a SASE. The job of a lit agency is to find manuscripts that adhere to a very specific (but unquantifiable) alchemy of heart, marketability, and resonance.
There is no point in wasting time dithering about things you do not adore or things you cannot sell. It’s not fair to the authors or the readers. Sometimes, you must write on a manuscript, “beautifully written, but no platform, not a single splintery plank of one.” The match between an agent and a book is more love at first sight than shotgun wedding. There is little use in writing, “Well. It’s not bad... You know…it’s set in a small town. There’s a fourteen-year-old girl, and she hates high school / has special powers / lives in the Civil War era. It might be okay.” The real fun is when books get picked up with speed and infectious excitement. Once, I looked at an email query and put it in the “Yes?” folder. My boss loved it, and quickly requested more. About two weeks later, the book was ours and the author was sending us her recipe for chocolate cake.
Every Monday and Wednesday, I take the commuter rail to South Station, and then walk to Beacon Street. This is a long process. As the summer whiled away and I became busier, my train-ly activities devolved from writing plays, to reading great books, to reading dubiously good books, to writing things in my planner, to napping. “Why do you go so far away for your internship?” my friends would ask. Well, it’s quite simple, really—it’s far, but once I get there, I read all day—about vampires and the Mayans and the rain forest and the Constitution and first kisses and lost treasure. Do you see?
Then they remember that I am that kid who is never without a book, ever, and admit that it makes total sense.
