My Summer 2024 Internship with Moonstone Arts Center

by Sarah Tachau ’27

Last winter I sat slumped over my computer and a hot mocha in one of my regular hometown cafes, back aching from an hour of revising poetry submissions. Halfway through break, I was hoisting the minimal motivation left in me to exercise the English-y part of my brain. While perusing Submittable, an anthology call for submissions from Moonstone Arts Center caught my eye. To my surprise, this small press was based not so far from me, in downtown Philadelphia. I took the chance to submit and reach out to the founder and current head of the house, Larry Robin, regarding summer internship openings.

Moonstone Arts Center, a nonprofit established in 1981, predominantly publishes new and upcoming poets from all over the world, as well as short educational booklets on hidden history. It hosts weekly live readings at Fergie’s Pub, a few short blocks away from the office, as well as in the Free Library of Philadelphia and over Zoom for the authors of its anthologies. In this age of technology, my first poetry reading, last March, was through a Moonstone Zoom call. I was joined by about 20 other writers, logging on from Philadelphia to Florida to California. 

The summer after reaching out to Larry, I mounted two flights of steep stairs for my first day in the Moonstone office, a renovated room of Larry’s house that was perched over a bistro. The door was unlabeled, but I knew I was close from the eclectic cluster of paintings and old-timey framed photographs that covered the walls past the restaurant’s second floor, as well as the hubbub of young voices debating something intranscribable. I came to know these voices, a handful of my fellow interns, quite well over the next two months. As my first time working on the other side of the publishing business, I had no idea what to expect. I soon discovered that every day at Moonstone would be unpredictable.

From monotonous housekeeping to interviewing Sonia Sanchez to caring for a sick guinea pig, Moonstone threw its interns through it all. I learned how to use programs such as Mailchimp to send out weekly emails and calls for submissions, in addition to updating the Squarespace shop. I got to see Submittable from the other end, copying lists of authors to send informational emails to, as well as catching my first glimpse into typesetting on Publisher. There was of course the weightlifting: carrying books and furniture from the creaky, dusty basement into the oppressive July heat. Yet what soon ate up most of my time at Moonstone was researching, writing, and formatting a 30-page historical booklet on voter suppression in the US. Larry allowed groups of interns to choose a long term project, and I was drawn to remaking a prior booklet that had been published for the 2020 election. 

I was accompanied by two fellow interns and Temple University students, one of whom was the talented artist of the group, the other a skilled writer who assisted in the early stages of research and drafting. When there were no dire housekeeping tasks to be completed, I’d research and write. Though I’m not the biggest history nerd, I was intrinsically motivated to learn about voter suppression as well as local voting laws in the swing-state tension of the upcoming election. The final product required me to work with Larry as well as professors and friends of his to format and fact check. The downside to the temporal nature of this internship, however, was that after I left I had little control over what became of the booklet. It was distributed via mailing lists, yet I discovered this fall that it had been reformatted and given a new cover page, consequently throwing the table of contents off. I have since reached out to correct the table of contents.

While I was occupied with voting history, other interns were helping Larry with the creation of a book to pay tribute to Moonstone. The publishing house, as I soon discovered, held a deeply rooted history in the Philadelphia literary community. Moonstone was born from Robin’s Books, an independent bookstore founded in 1936 by Larry’s grandfather. Despite closing in 2012, the impact of Robin’s Books was not to be forgotten. The store was a home to counterculture titles such as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer– a banned book city residents could only find at Robin’s. As the store moved locations and Moonstone Arts Center was formed, Robin began hosting poetry readings and talks from local political speakers. His wife, Sandy, started a preschool, focused on learning through and from art. 

Although it was not my main project, I devoted a fair share of my time to assisting in the archival work associated with the tribute to Moonstone publication. I sorted through caricatures of poets at live readings, art from the preschool, old anthologies, and hidden history newspapers Moonstone put out in the late 2000s. In an attempt to commemorate Moonstone’s Celebration of Black Writing, an annual event the press began hosting upon its founding, Larry connected the interns with esteemed poet Sonia Sanchez for a virtual interview. Sanchez, a current Philadelphia resident, made several appearances at the Celebration of Black Writing in its early days, and spoke fondly of both Larry and Moonstone’s impact on the city’s poetry community. 

To me, Moonstone served as an inspirational and comforting step stone into the publishing industry. Though I wish I could’ve been interning in the days of Robin’s Books, I treasure my experience from the past summer as an opportunity to be a part of a trailblazing literary hub. Beyond the housekeeping and communication skills I picked up, I learned that every publishing house, no matter how small or how unique of a niche it has, is kindling a creative fire that fuels our future.