When I found out I’d gotten the internship at Portland Magazine, I was ecstatic–not only did this mean my dreary internship search would end and that my back-up plan, teaching swimming lessons at the local pool, would escape implementation, it meant that I got to spend the summer in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Having spent every summer of my happy childhood here, I breathlessly anticipated warm days of walking upon the beach and fantasized about wearing summery business-wear, linen blouses and all. I remembered every aspect of those brilliant summery youthful days of squirt-gun fights and kayaking, but apparently, there was one thing I forgot. It’s May. And it’s still really cold.
Instead of wearing a lovely summer dress to my first day of work here, I wore instead a thick woolen dress with tights and boots. Weirdly, my dream summer was starting off like a Scottish winter. Despite the weather setback, my first day was great. With my head still stuck in the customary end-of-spring-semester urgency, I plowed through my assignments and left feeling efficient and excited.
There’s something great about having a job, about the sense of purpose that comes from working with other people towards a cohesive goal, in my case, next month’s issue of Portland Magazine.
As an intern, I’ve done a lot of odd jobs around the magazine: fact-checking, copy-editing, securing photo rights, et cetera. But I guess what reaches me about all these little jobs is how they feed into page after page of material, merged and blended with the work of authors and graphic artists and photographers and quotes: those captured snippets of everyday people and celebrities. I am now part of a literary conglomerate, where every page of print implies room upon room of people working the phones, the streets, the computer keyboard. It’s really incredible to think that what you read, whether you are a serious reader of Portland Magazine or someone who flips through it from time to time in waiting rooms and hotels, is actually the testimony of a city parading itself before you.
Like the hard-earned sun of the Portland, Maine, summer, each triumph–in my case each new issue–is the shining product of cold, grey days like my first day.
–Jacqueline Leahy