In 2015, Troll Thread had their one and only intern, presumably named Phil. Due to the publishing collective’s general rejection of exploitative internship culture in the publishing industry, they turned Phil’s stay into an artistic publishing practice, leading to three publications: DEMO BOOK FOR INTERN by Joey Yearous-Algozin (Troll Thread), Poems Abt ‘Intern’ and ‘Phil’ the Intern by Chris Sylvester (Area Sneaks, 2016), and INTERN by the intern himself. The latter is a meticulous documentation of tasks assigned to the intern between April 20 and May 11, 2015, the time he spent to fulfill these tasks, commentary on takeaways, and a complete documentation of text and email conversations he had with the publishers, plus Chris Sylvester’s Poems Abt ‘Intern’ and ‘Phil’ the Intern.

All tasks are put into the form of a “Timesheet,” including the fields “TITLE / NAME,” “DESCRIPTION,” “APPROX. TIME ‘SPENT,’” “APPROX. DATE(S) OF ACTIVITY,” “OUTCOMES / RESULTS,” “NOTES (‘OPTIONAL’).” This adds up to sixty-four tasks in total, ranging from installing Adobe Acrobat, to having cigarette breaks, to solving Tumblr catalog issues, to writing spreadsheets of the complete costs of Troll Thread’s publications and creating test publications. The painstaking segmentation and documentation of tasks is in harsh contrast to the tasks themselves, which are often commented on ironically, such as here: “attempted download and install adobe. failed, listened to bright eyes and ate ice cream.”

At the same time, the reader gains insight into the production and distribution conditions at Lulu, for example which Troll Thread publications Lulu forbids access to, which ones are now unavailable because Lulu no longer offers a certain type of binding, and the fact that Lulu’s cart limit is forty-four books. It also becomes clear how much time, energy, work, and struggle with technology it takes to keep the seemingly undemanding Troll Thread Tumblr page up to date and error-free, or to fix gutter issues in the PDFs.

By documenting the internship and publishing it in their program, Troll Thread turns what would only be one person’s hidden work and insights into a public glimpse into their publishing activities, their understanding of publishing and poetry, their workflows, and everyday lives. As part of the “Timesheet,” Intern also documents the discussion and creation of the publication itself, ending with the task “Emailing Updated INTERN BY INTERN docs to H. Melgard.”