Thank you

Hello,

I apologize for not responding via Facebook, but I had been meaning to tell you about the job via email all day.  I kept thinking to myself, EMAIL HER.  So. Here it is.  Here is the full circle account of how you saved my life, or made my life what it is at this moment.  You gave me the best contacts there are in New York.  I chatted with all of them, got my feet wet a bit.  Then Dana Isaacson emailed me in September, with the name "Writer's House," and I jumped on it, got the internship from an interview over the phone, and moved to NYC.  That internship, through which I gained SO much knowledge of the industry that I thought I knew so much about but didn't at all, landed me a friendship with Jennifer Kelaher and the famous Maja Nikolic.  I worked under these women, these fabulous, inviting women, who taught me what it to sell the rights of a book and to love a book so much that we must sell it EVERYWHERE.  I was, in fact, the Foreign Rights intern.  The internship ended, and I was lost.  I had been nannying throughout it, since October, and am presently doing so, making peanut butter and jelly's and crepes and wiping buggary faces for 4 adorable, intelligent French-American children who I adore but know that I need to move on from.  I didn't move to NYC to nanny.  So, ever since Christmas, when the internship ended, I have been putting my name out there, my resume flying around like wild fire, and I had a bite.  I heard from Nature Publishing Group, and they wanted me to be their Customer Service Coordinator, and I was about to take it because it was a job (not because it was what I wanted to do).  Then, Scholastic fell into my lap.  A girl from Writer's House who had worked for Maja, who quit about a month after I got there, (and consequentially gave me her office!) emailed and told me a friend of hers at Scholastic was in desperate need of a Foreign Rights Coordinator.  I sent my resume.  Next day, I had an interview.  Next day, they asked for references. The next week, (this week, allll this week), I waited and waited and waited and my stomach was in the most horrible twisted knots it has ever been in.  I literally couldn't breathe.  This morning, as I stood in the kitchen at my nannying job, before the kids got home from school, I got the call. I screamed into the phone as Rachel Horowitz, my savior, screamed back.  We screamed and screamed for a while because this was no ordinary hiring.  She had managed to finagle a hiring during a hiring freeze at Scholastic.  After all had settled, we chatted about the logistics, and yada.  And the possibility of me going to Bologna, Italy in March with them.  (AHH).  I start Thursday.  I start Thursday the next chapter of my life.

I wish we were back at the zoo in Madison together, laughing about the sea otters with Charlie and talking about how to get "in" to New York.  It's happening now, and I can't wait until I can give you a big fat hug and a high-five for what you have done for me.  I really mean it.  Thank you.

SINCERELY, 

Lisa Mattingly