What happens when interns are left (almost) alone?

This was a pretty quiet week at Friends Journal. Some staff members spent the week at the Friends General Conference, an annual meeting of liberal Quakers, and a few others were on vacation. The interns greatly outnumbered actual staff every day!

Our supervisor left us with a substantial project to work on in his absence. Six of us spent the week reading through a huge pile of submissions with the ultimate goal of selecting feature articles for the November issue. We each began by reading and commenting on as many articles as possible to get a range of opinions on each one. Then we organized the articles into piles based on our opinions (as well as the comments of past interns on some of the older submissions). We came up with a lot of categories to accommodate articles we weren’t sure about and ended up with a pretty complete spectrum: no, maybe/no, maybe, maybe/yes, yes with editing or a rewrite from the author, yes but for a later article, yes but not as a feature article, yes for November, and a pile for articles that need to be read by more people. Finally, we had to cut our ‘yes for November’ pile in half to stay within the suggested limit of 12,000 words. I think we finished with a strong selection of articles for November with a good balance of spiritual, social, and historical pieces.


Overall I thought the process went pretty smoothly. We worked well together and mostly agreed about the articles we thought should be published. I hope that our supervisor approves of the articles we chose!

After we finished our project I resumed work on the milestones database. Before I knew it my workweek was over.

For a change of pace and perhaps some enlightenment, here are some of the Quaker terms I’ve come across in the past few weeks. Enjoy:
-unprogrammed Friends: Quakers who meet for silent worship without a pastor. Those present wait for “leadings of the Spirit” to speak
-meeting for worship: what unprogrammed Friends call their religious gatherings
-birthright Friend: someone born to Quaker parents (as opposed to a convinced Friend who becomes a Quaker later in life)
-seasoning: a period of waiting when you aren’t sure what to choose or what action to take
-witness: some type of public action, often to work against social injustices or other issues.