It is always difficult to wrap up a story or poem nicely—for me, anyway. Sometimes I just keep droning on, and other times I just cannot get my brain to think of a way to tie that nice, pretty bow on a poem—so my notebook is filled with unfinished poems. Some pages are covered in one-off lines or ideas that I keep telling myself I will go back to someday, other pages are crossed out from frustration, and others—though rare these days—have completed poems that I am happy with leaving the way they are.
I am on day twenty-five of writing every day. Some days I forget to write so I make it up on the next day and write two poems instead of one. Some days I sit down after completing all my work and nothing wants to go on the page—that excuse of being uninspired seems very appealing on those days. But, I know I cannot tell myself that anymore. Even on the days where I just have to accept that what I wrote is not good enough (for me), they are still days I wrote something—anything—down, and it gets me one step closer to being proud of the writer I am becoming.
I imagine (and I hope it is true) that the authors I researched and put on the LibGuides felt this way too. I cannot imagine that Hemans wrote “Casabianca” in one sitting, or that Pound wrote his various Cantos once and was happy with them. It is an odd thing to have to tell myself that it is okay to draft poems and not complete them in one sitting. Part of the creative process is revision, and it took me until the last few years to realize that.
And working with LibGuides really helped me understand what revision meant. For me, it would have been impossible to sit down one afternoon and completely finish a guide in one go—but that was frustrating in the beginning. Yes, I wanted to learn, but I also do not like to leave projects unfinished. Exercising that control of, “I will come back to this,” is one of the most beneficial things I have learned from this internship. I can carry that idea for the rest of my life and apply it to most anything, and learning it now while I have that freedom to “come back” is invaluable.
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Today is the official end of my internship with Gumberg. In one of the most work-intensive semesters of my academic career, I found immense joy in working with Dr. Wright and Mr. Bergfelt for this internship. I cannot begin to thank them enough for their time and effort, of which they gave a great deal. The experience of being able to work behind the scenes in a library, with one of the more prominent tools used in Library Science (LibGuides), is an experience that I will never forget. Whenever it is that I apply to graduate school to become an academic librarian, I will be able to bring this internship with me and prove my dedication.
I titled this internship “Endings” because, well, my internship is ending. But, maybe it necessarily is not. No, I will not be going into the back office of Gumberg four days a week anymore, nor will I be working with LibGuides all that often, but I also will not forget the work I have done. And someday, when I am a librarian, preparing a presentation or creating a new LibGuide myself, I will think of how I spent hours searching for writers and videos about modernism and editing pictures so they face right. And I will smile.
Building Bridges 