Alumni Spotlight: Min Marcus, Class of ’22
What are you up to right now?
During the day, I work remotely as a production editor for Louisiana State University Press. This involves a lot of sending emails and squinting at Word documents. During the evening, I alternate between writing my novel and doomscrolling on my phone because the sentences for my novel won’t come out right. TL;DR: I am sitting at my desk.
Were there any key turning points or decisions in your journey after graduating USC to what you’re doing now?
Editing and publishing is an oversaturated market (of folks who believe they can edit but they simply cannot, but they know how to play the corporate game, so unfortunately you must acknowledge them as competitors). As a result, because I am not a nepo baby and I despise the corporate game, I landed zero (0) jobs upon graduation and had to return to my home state of New Mexico (not a publishing hub) to live with my parents. After not receiving a call back for a second interview for a sales associate position at a bookstore and being stood up at a Starbucks interview because the manager wasn’t in store (despite being the one who chose the time and date for the interview), I was decidedly fed up and started sending out cold-call emails to managers of places with contact information on their websites. One of these places was the University of New Mexico Press, whose editing and production manager took my request seriously and forwarded along job listings in the following months as they were posted. I applied for a production assistant opening, for which I was accepted, and thus began my foray into production editorial work (think: copyediting, proofreading). Before going through the humiliation ritual of applying for customer-service jobs post grad, I had never considered university publishing as the direction in which I wanted to take my editing/publishing career. But here I am, now a production editor, putting my degree and interest in the literary arts to use at a university press. So maybe try sending those unsolicited emails and see where they take you.
Thinking back to your student days, what’s one piece of advice that would have made the biggest difference in your college experience or career planning?
Talk to your professors, then talk to them again, and keep talking to them until one day, a year or two after you have graduated, they invite you to meet up at a café near your childhood home because they happen to be in town for a few days and have a genuine interest in catching up with you on your professional/artistic/personal/etc. growth beyond the classroom. Build relationships not for the sake of having connections but because relationships lead to community and community is life. Writing, reading, and editing, despite their reputation as solitary crafts, are communal projects requiring communal investment and interest. Grow your community while you can, because unless you stay in academia, it will be rare to find so many people in one place willing to discuss the literary arts in intellectual depth with you again. Take advantage of the university environment to find your people and foster relationships that may very well last for life.
Are there any specific courses, professors, or resources within the English department or USC that you’d highly recommend to current students?
If you identify as a writer (or even if you don’t but are curious about writing), take as many writing workshops as you can in every concentration you can with every professor you can. There’s nothing like baring your soul to a room full of strangers and a professional in the field via your creative writing to get the blood pumping. But seriously, because the class sizes are limited, and often limited to students majoring in the department, writing workshops are essentially exclusive settings, and unfortunately exclusive settings are exclusive for a reason. In baring your soul you will grow as a writer and reader and editor, and maybe you will make some friends who will continue to workshop with you outside of the classroom. Even if you’re able to find writing workshops beyond the university setting, receiving the same sort of structure and quality of critique will be difficult to come by. So take those writing workshops! Writing a bad poem is more fun than writing a ten-page essay anyway.