Democratizing the literary arts in the Adirondack Park
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In summer 2025, I interned at the Adirondack Center for Writing, a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the literary arts more accessible to everyone in the Adirondack region of New York State.
It was the ACW's mission that made me interested in working there. Working as a journalist, as I did in summer 2024, often meant I was expressing others voices through my own words. In summer 2025, I wanted to help and inspire others to express their voices for themselves.
My responsibilities during the internship ended up being quite diverse. The ACW runs a lot of programs, such as live storytelling events, free poetry machines, community writing and social cohesion get-togethers, and more. The director, Nathalie Thill, is primarily in charge of these programs, but she usually needs an assistant -- a program manager -- to help her out. The ACW was in between program managers when I came onboard, so I took on a lot of those duties myself. I also had to handle financial transactions between the non-profit and our donors.
The full list of my duties over the summers is as follows: selecting appropriately, diverse, fun, accessible, and high-quality poems for the ACW's free poetry-dispensing machine; contacting small businesses to host the poetry machine and delivering the machine to these businesses; doing outreach to interested community members; photographing and helping host writing, storytelling, and connection-themed events; setting up a live fundraising auction for the ACW in partnership with local businesses; creating, signing, and mailing thank you letters to donors; entering donation checks into Neon CRM; adding new donor and audience contacts in Neon and Mailchimp; passing submission critiques on to writers' residency applicants and making sure that the right critiques went to the right people; maintaining the upkeep of the ACW's headquarters/writing lounge and explaining our mission to people who stopped in while the director was away; helping board members with tech support issues.
In the sum of all these responsibilities, I was directly immersed in the work of helping run a non-profit, which I consider a valuable learning experience. Even more importantly, everything I did for the ACW helped both myself and the organization as a whole to help people express their own voices through writing and storytelling, just as I had hoped going into the internship.
I hope that every person I encountered over the course of my internship was someone who walked away feeling that much more confident, seen, and validated as a storyteller. And when I remember the smiles on the faces of people who got free poems from the poetry machine, or that kid who I helped get through his writer's block, I feel that I've truly done something good for my corner of the world.