Creative License Shenandoah’s internship program helps undergraduates craft a career path.

Kelsey Goodwin
July 22, 2025

While Shenandoah honors its storied past by celebrating its 75th anniversary, its present continues to be a rotating cast of students who join the ranks each year in the magazine’s internship course.

The course, ENGL 453: Shenandoah Internship, is an immersive, hands-on experience with Shenandoah, which involves undergraduate students in every stage of the magazine’s twice-yearly production under Beth Staples, associate professor of English and the magazine’s editor since 2018.

“It’s an exciting time to be an intern for Shenandoah, on the cusp of such a momentous anniversary,” Staples says. “They are part of and contributing to real literary history, and their work has value on this campus and beyond — it means something to writers and readers out in the world.”

Students in the course’s Fall and Winter Term sections read and evaluate submissions for the upcoming issue, participate in group discussions and assist with substantive editing, copyediting, fact-checking and proofreading. Special projects outside production include a blog, social media content creation and a research project that asks students to analyze other literary magazines.

The course allows interns to learn industry practices like managing author correspondence, website content and promotion. They choose a writer from the current issue to highlight through personalized projects, such as interviews, social media features or creative endeavors, including a Spotify playlist tied to the issue. There are also larger team projects, including an events team that brought two nonfiction writers to campus during Winter Term and helped select two visitors who will come to campus in the fall for the English Department’s Shannon-Clark Lecture Series; a publicity team tasked with finding ways to celebrate the magazine’s anniversary across campus; and a “swag team” responsible for designing and purchasing promotional items such as stickers, keychains and shirts for the magazine, funded by a small grant made available through the Office of the Dean of the College.

“I tell the students all the time that I truly couldn’t run the magazine without them,” Staples says. “They bring so much good energy and so many fresh ideas and are wonderful about helping me execute those ideas.”

Staples says one of the class’ strengths is that it attracts many non-English or creative writing majors, providing students from a variety of disciplines with unique insight into the world of publishing. Staples runs the class like a staff meeting, focusing on the magazine’s dynamic needs each week while offering a crash course in editing, publishing and creative promotion. Betty Boatwright ’26, a business administration major and creative writing minor, says the discussion-based approach to the class was the highlight of her experience.

“I love classes that allow for the kind of discussion we have when we nominate stories to discuss as a group,” Boatwright says, “especially since so much of the content we’re reviewing is nothing like anything I’ve read before.”

Shenandoah internship alumna Madelyn Venable ’25 says the internship provided very practical, hands-on experience that helped her develop professional skills transferable to a variety of career paths.

“The internship allowed us to actually take a piece through the real editing and publishing process, which was very fulfilling,” says Venable, an English and strategic communications double major who now plans to pursue a career in publishing. “It was very cool to be able to go from a theoretical classroom project to then get real-world experience.”

Emma Malinak ’25, an English major and former intern at Shenandoah who also conducted an independent study on Shenandoah’s history, says the skills she learned from writing long-form stories and conducting interviews for the magazine have already proven invaluable in her chosen field of journalism. During her internship at a news outlet in Vermont last summer, Malinak pitched a story about how recent flooding in the area had impacted artists and writers, an idea she was able to execute by leveraging the knowledge and network she built during her Shenandoah internship.

“I think it’s been beneficial for me in my reporting internships,” Malinak says. “I’ve had multiple opportunities to work on stories that include interviews with writers and artists because I have the experience through Shenandoah.”

Alumni who participated in the internship as students say they came away from the experience with impactful skills.

“Shenandoah helped give me direction,” says Gabriela Gomez-Misserian ’21, who graduated with a double major in English and studio art. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my two majors, but I knew I enjoyed collaborating with people who valued storytelling, perspective and creativity. I had started looking at writing-focused jobs, but my time at Shenandoah solidified my preference for editorial work over trying to do something like journalism. The rest of my classes at W&L that I took that year (which included a hybrid literature capstone, a Jane Austen literature class and a comics-making Spring Term class) leaned into the art of storytelling, and Shenandoah helped to carve that space out.” Gomez-Misserian is now the digital editorial producer for Garden & Gun magazine.

Beth Ann Townsend ’20, who interned for Shenandoah in fall 2019, has worked for the past three years in the video-game industry, designing and writing for educational games while contracting with an award-winning escape-room center, a tabletop-inspired video-game system and a role-playing game. Townsend, who continues to serve as a reader for Shenandoah to help Staples and the current interns sift through the high volume of submissions, says class discussions, reading a wide variety of fiction, interviewing writers for social media projects and exercising her creativity in a collaborative space were her favorite parts of the internship.

“By that time in my W&L career, I already knew that I wanted to pursue game design and writing, so I appreciated the opportunity to read, edit, discuss and improve my work,” Townsend says. “Sitting on the ‘opposite’ side of the writers’ table — working as a reader — helped me be an even better creator.”

Several students in the fall 2024 internship cohort say that while they may not be pursuing a career in publishing or creative writing, the course was an invaluable insight into both their own craft as writers and as readers.

“It’s helped me discern what I like and don’t like, stylistically and thematically, and it has broadened my perception of what’s possible,” says Renna McNair ’25, a biochemistry major. “It has also made me a slower reader; I’ve realized that first impressions from quick reading often don’t do a story justice. When I read too quickly, I risk missing the intentionality behind certain details and don’t always appreciate the narrative voice. This course has taught me a tremendous amount about my own writing.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine. Contact us at magazine@wlu.edu.