A Whole New World: My View from the Scarletta Office and a Little Poem

Greetings, fellow bibliophiles! As one of the newest additions to Scarletta Press I’d like to start at the beginning. I’ve only been working here a couple weeks and here are a few of my first impressions and thoughts about the office:

1. It is indoors. It is immensely preferable to being outdoors in Minnesota in October so we’re already on the right track.

2. The view is great. Whenever I look out the window I like to think about hopping into an airplane and pitching press kits overboard. If somebody went to the effort of parachuting books down to you from the ether you’d take a moment to read them. There’s room in the budget for tiny parachutes, right?

3. There is a fully-stocked craft room here. THERE IS A FULLY STOCKED CRAFT ROOM. If there is happiness in life does it not come from hot-gluing stuff to other stuff?

4. There are books. Lots of books. Every day is a new read! So, while the first three details are great, number four is the real selling point.

Now that you understand where I’m coming from (literally) I’d like to let you know who I am. My name is Elaina and I’m new to Scarletta’s Marketing and Publicity team. I’m a graduate of Beloit College where I studied Psychology and Creative writing. After college I worked as an intern at Graywolf Press and later Tiger Oak Publications while writing local theater reviews.

I’m excited to make the jump to working with a lot of Scarletta’s children’s titles. One of my favorite authors as a child was Shel Silverstein. His poems have a sense of whimsy and homespun charm that both children and adults can relate to. They challenge the reader to imagine new worlds while offering silly wisdom about real life experiences. When thinking about my goals at Scarletta one of his poems comes to mind:

Put Something In

Draw a crazy picture,

Write a nutty poem,

Sing a mumble-gumble song,

Whistle through your comb.

Do a loony-goony dance

‘Cross the kitchen floor,

Put something silly in the world

That ain’t been there before.

~Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

If there’s one goal I hope to achieve at Scarletta it’s to be part of an effort to create and inspire. I suppose, in the words of Shel Silverstein, I want to make sure that I’m always ready to “put something in.”

-Elaina