Emerging Writers Network

Experiences With Editors - Alexander Lumans

The following comes from Alexander Lumans.

When I think of the positive experiences I’ve had with editors (Kevin Watson at Press 53, Ron Mitchell at Southern Indiana Review, and the fiction editor Glenn Lester at Greensboro Review, to name a few) the one that jumps out at me most was my time with Christopher Hellwig of Black Warrior Review.  Like other journals out there that are attached at the hip to their respective academic institutions, BWR is staffed primarily by graduate students.  This means that the staff’s turnover rate is 100% every few years.  But it also means that the magazine is constantly changing to match the current editors’ aesthetics.  Fortunately, in September of last year, I found out that BWR wanted to publish a short story of mine that I’d begun to lose a little hope on because it had been out there for a while in the submission jungle and because in the mean time I’d graduated, moved to a new time zone, and written new stories.

Of course, I was very pleased with the acceptance and soon found renewed hope in this particular story.  I’ve long admired BWR as a place that publishes sharp, memorable stuff. Moreover, the magazine has some serious cred as one that puts out work that people intentionally seek out to read. (As I’m writing this, an old friend has messaged me to congratulate me on being published in BWR.) Christopher expressed in an email that he and the rest of the BWR staff liked the story a lot—and then I figured the usual process would go on: a spirited email exchange of manuscript proofs and copyedits and eleventh hour questions, right?  However, Christopher asked if we could talk on the phone in October to discuss a few edits to the story.  Foreign territory here I came. So we arranged a phone-date.  And through the course of this conversation, we went line by line through the story (it was only four pages).  Occasionally Christopher would voice a couple of questions.  Sometimes it was about a specific word choice, other times a confusing sentence, and other times an image that just didn’t quite fit perfectly.  We made edits right there and set aside other things to be fixed in the future.  He also pointed out lines that he thought were particularly strong (so it wasn’t all needling critique).  But I can distinctly remember sitting on the couch in my bare apartment living room, the story in front of me and the phone in my hand, and telling myself, “Hey, this is really cool.  I actually get to talk to the editor.”  I felt his genuine interest and critical engagement with the work on a very detailed level as well as with the story as a whole.  His exacting attention and encouragement breathed some life back into a story that I’d slowly become unsure about.  We spent at least half an hour working our way through the piece and by the end I had a small to-do list.  The conversation ended with a real sense that not only did this editor have an understanding of his own aesthetics (which is important to me because it inspires trust in the editor’s decisions) but he also had things under control in terms of what needed to be done. 

The rest of the process went smoothly with revisions and proofs and publication—the story “Tunnel Out of Georgia” is now out in the most recent issue.

But as mentioned before, the BWR staff doesn’t stick around, and now there’s a new Fiction Editor, a new Editor-in-Chief, a new everyone.  So while this may seem like a moot story, I believe that BWR practices this same routine of actually calling their writers and discussing their work in detail.  So, while Christopher isn’t there anymore, this same experience is going to be continued with each year’s staff, which is a great thing to know.  I now feel a little spoiled by the treatment I had at the hands of Black Warrior Review, but it’s the good, right kind of spoiled.

Alexander Lumans was born in Aiken, SC.  He graduated from the MFA Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  His fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Story Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Surreal South ’09, and The Versus Anthology, among others.  He currently eats and teaches in Boulder, CO.

Experiences With Editors - Roxane Gay

The following comes from Roxane Gay, a pretty darned good editor herself from what I've read and heard:

I have worked with many great editors who have helped me become a better writer but I'd love to talk about two in particular.

Steve Himmer is a mensch. He accepted my story "Things I Know About Fairy Tales" for Necessary Fiction even though it was longer than the work he normally accepts. It takes one hell of an editor to look beyond writer's guidelines when the right kind of story comes along and he did which I thought was so awesome. He made some really subtle but wonderful suggestions that added a really interesting shape to my story. He also suggested a different ending and it was one simple line that for me really highlighted the very best parts of my story. When I read his suggested ending, it took my breath away. It was such a great experience to work with an editor who really understood my story so well that he knew exactly what to suggest. It's been about nine months since that story appeared and in the interim Steve has kept in touch with me and it has been nice to see how invested he is in fostering long term relationships with writers and I've continued to read Necessary Fiction each week because it is a magazine curated by someone who really loves words and respects writers.

Matt Bell likes to preface his editorial suggestions with the disclaimer that he can be heavy handed with the proverbial red pen but I have never found that to be the case. He lies! Forgive him the fabrication. I've worked with Matt twice--once via the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions (which is an experience I think every writer should try at least once) and once with a story he accepted for The Collagist. With my story "Down to Bone," which Matt read when I sent it to him via DCWS, he made suggestions that did, on the surface, seem pretty radical. There was rearranging and excising and in the original version, there were about 20 mini-stories with their own titles that he strongly suggested I do away with (which I did). When I sat with his editorial suggestions and commentary and took a really hard look at the story I saw he had pared away all my tendencies toward overwriting and helped me tell the most important parts of the story. We had a really great back and forth about the story and by some stroke of good fortune, Matt was familiar with the place where my story was situated so he was able to approach the work with a sensitivity that only helped the story become what it was supposed to be. What I appreciated even more was his confidence in my writing. He told me to aim high when I submitted the story so I did and was so thrilled when the story was accepted by a magazine I have long admired. When Matt accepted my story "La Negra Blanca" for The Collagist, he took the same thought and care with my work and I must say that as an editor, Matt is the kind of person who makes you fall even more in love with your own work because he has a freakish ability to see the best parts of it and help you bring them out even though he has that little veracity problem with regard to his purported heavy handedness. 

Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Annalemma, Mid-American Review, The Collagist, Gargoyle, Keyhole, DIAGRAM, Monkeybicycle 7 and others. She is the co-editor of PANK, a contributor at HTML GIANT and can be found online at http://www.roxanegay.com.

Experiences With Editors - M Sarki

Another in this series, this time from poet M Sarki:

Since 1995 Gordon Lish has been my teacher, and the editor of all my poems. I have used no other editor, ever. My first book of poems ZIMBLE ZAMBLE ZUMBLE was published in 2000 by Deron Bauman's elimae books in a limited edition Japanese binding of seventy-five copies. A beautiful book and one I am most proud of. When I sent Deron a rather large collection of poems for the book all he had to do was choose the ones he liked and arrange their order. After some elapsed time it turned out to be a task he passed back on to me.  So I asked Deron how many poems he wanted in the book and simply went through and listed the ones I chose in the order they were written and approved for publication by Gordon Lish. That was easy, pure and simple, and no big deal. And I think we got it right. I love that book and am forever grateful to Deron for doing it.  

Still to this very day, when I write a poem it first goes in the mail to Lish for his approval.  It is an understanding Gordon and I have always had since he was editing The Quarterly and had already accepted about fifty poems of mine for publication that eventually never saw the light of day before The Quarterly folded up. Gordon and I practice today as if he were still running that magazine and I am still submitting poems for publication in it. And when I make it into his defunct rag I still feel fatly satisfied. I have had a multitude of poems accepted by Gordon for publication.  

When Gordon returns a poem to me there is either a Yes on it, sometimes circled and sometimes not, or a No, or maybe an OK, or a So So. If the poem has a No or a So So on it it goes directly in the trash. There are times he writes a scribbly note near a word or the title that says for me to beat it as in do better. But after so many years of working with him I pretty much have a feel for what he'll like and what he won't. I get mostly a Yes these days. But I will always love a Yes that has been circled by his hand. It means he really liked it.    

I am reporting here about my history with Mr. Lish because of all the negative press about writers working with him. He is an amazing editor who is extremely perceptive and fast. Writers could only be so lucky to have Gordon Lish looking over their shoulder. But it's not just writers complaining about Lish who amaze me. I think it's also worth noting how many editors through the years have actually wanted me to ditch Lish and allow their own self to be my new decider. That I don't need Lish. That I need to move on. And that just isn't going to happen. Anybody who knows Gordon Lish and his great talents (genius!) as an editor realizes how fortunate I am to have him still working for me. I wouldn't trade him or his hard tyrannical ways for anybody, even if it meant I would never be published again. I had an offer once from a small college press in New Orleans who had cheerfully agreed to publish ZZZ only if I removed from the book the foreword that had been written by Gordon Lish. Of course I said no thanks and went my merry way. Ever since that most disagreeable period of my writing life I have refrained from sending out poems and manuscripts to publishers in hopes that they will publish my work. But I do honor all requests from editors for poems or manuscripts with the complete understanding the poems have already been edited by Gordon Lish and will remain as submitted. Kathryn Rantala's Ravenna Press published my second book of poems titled LITTLE WAR MACHINE and my own publishing company that deals only in handmade books published my last title MEWL HOUSE. And there we sit. I still have at least one more, maybe two, manuscripts waiting for a publisher, but I haven't sent them anywhere, and nobody's asked.  But for the record, if you're good, I honor all requests. Just know I already have an editor. And I like him writing his wonderful stuff inside. It gets me giddy.

M Sarki was born in East Tawas, Michigan in 1953. Besides being an accomplished poet with three collections published, Sarki is a painter and photographer. He likes fine coffee and long walks, as well as his good woman of many years running. He has written a screenplay "Alphonso Bow" which was produced by Nut Bucket Films. There are others in the works. There is some talk about a play. And food perhaps. Anything creative goes. But quite less stays.

Experiences With Editors - A. Manette Ansay

And the series is back, hopefully more entries will be coming soon!

I have had the same editor, currently at HarperCollins, for all but the first novel I published.  That first editor spent a lot of time working on pages and paragraphs, and I responded the way I usually respond when somebody makes specific comments about my work, suggestions along the line of take this out, move that, do you really need this character?  Something in me shuts down, shuts up, covers its ears when confronted with this type of feedback.  Possibly it's because, like questions that can be answered "yes" or "no," I'm reacting to these concrete fixes with concrete defenses.  So I say, I need this here because of this.  I insist, But if I move that, then this won't work.  The thing is, I wanted the book to be better.  I wanted my then-editor’s expertise.  But by then, this book--it was Vinegar Hill--was mine and mine alone. I had lived with it for almost three years.  I'd written another book after finishing it.  And though I could see things I might improve, I couldn't address those challenges using someone else's ideas.  I should mention that I really liked this editor personally.  I enjoyed spending time with her.  She was the sort of person I could image being my friend.  I should also mention that she's gone on to have a very successful career.  But on the page--or rather, with the pages between us--we never quite did click. 

I could never imagine being friends with my current editor.  I find her too intimidating.  She's brilliant.  Her literary ear is pitch-perfect.  She doesn’t suffer fools gladly.  She edits the way Annie Dillard's miner might, working her way slowly through dark and potentially dangerous spaces, tapping with her pick to make sure each step she takes will hold, pausing when she hears something different, something potentially hollow, false, thin.  Of course, these are exactly the places that I've moved through swiftly on tiptoe, hoping that no one will linger here, hoping that no one will notice.  She always notices.  She jumps up and down until the spot caves in and then points, outraged, to the hole.  Look at this sloppy workmanship!  This has got to be fixed!  But she seldom, if ever, tells me how to fix it.  She leaves that up to me.  And I fix it.   Not by eliminating a character or changing a timeline--though this might occur.  But I don’t begin there.  I begin with the work as a whole.  Each change I make is a global one (even if it's only a sentence.)  So the revision occurs organically, from the ground up, rather than the top down.   This is what my editor has taught me.  I am no less awed by her than I was when we first met in 1995.  I continue to learn and grow under her care.

A. Manette Ansay is the author of 6 novels, most recently Blue Water and Good Things I Wish You (due out in paper this July), as well as a memoir, Limbo, and a collection of short stories.  She has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a two time winner of the Great Lakes Book Award, and an Oprah Winfrey Book Club pick.  Visit her at www.amanetteansay.com/wordpress/blog

Experiences With Editors - Matt Bell

The following comes from a pretty damn good editor in his own right, Matt Bell:

In January of 2009, Samuel Ligon of Willow Springs sent me an e-mail kindly rejecting the most recent story I’d sent to his magazine, but also asking if I’d be willing to talk to him on the phone about it, as he had some thoughts about how the story might be improved. I gave him a call the next day, and he was kind enough to spend thirty minutes or so discussing my story with me, pointing out both what was already working in the story and what ultimately wasn’t, all the while demonstrating that he’d clearly thought carefully and deeply about what I was trying to accomplish with the story so that he could better advise me on how to get there.

Even if that was the end of the story, I’d still consider Sam Ligon one of the best editors I ever had. That conversation pushed me to try to take my stories farther before submitting them, to keep revising until I had something absolutely as good as I thought I could make it, and then to try to take it at least a little farther. That push has paid off in a lot of ways in the last year, and I’m glad Sam was there to give it to me.

Eventually, I submitted another story to Willow Springs, and eventually I got another invitation to call Sam and talk. Even though this situation was different—he was accepting the story this time—Sam once again enthusiastically demonstrated his ability to see my story in great detail, both for what it already was and what it could be after one more strong rewrite. He helped me diagnose the last big problem with my story as well as a handful of minor ones, then set me to work fixing them before going through the story himself to offer another round of line edits.

I can see now that Sam was the ideal reader and editor for this story: He understood my goals for it completely, and was able to articulate those goals back to me better than anyone else who had read it so far or has since. I truly believe that it would be a lesser story if it had been published by anyone else.

The story of mine that Sam edited has just come out in Willow Springs 65, and I couldn't be happier to see it there.  Called "The Receiving Tower," it's one of my favorite stories I wrote last year, and I'm glad it found a home with a magazine I've long admired and an editor who has become one of my own role models for how I conduct my own editing at The Collagist.  I can't thank Sam enough for taking the time to read my work so carefully, and to encourage and develop it throughout our interactions this last year.  I've been lucky to work with a lot of great editors over the past few years, but there's no doubt that he's one of the very best. 

Experiences With Editors - Pamela Erens

Experiences with both book and journal editors from Pamela Erens (who I had the pleasure of including in the anthology Visiting Hours):

Time is my best editor. My drafts don’t come out fully formed, or even close. I circle my sentences for a long period of time—months, years. That’s time I need to muse, plan, attack, retreat, incorporate new material from what I’ve read or heard or experienced since the last time I approached a particular paragraph or scene.

            With my novel, The Understory, I was lucky to have an editor, Jin Soo Kang of Ironweed Press, who gave me both the gift of time and a major insight into my story. The Understory is narrated by 40-year-old Jack Gorse, who becomes attracted to and obsessed with another man. Jin Soo told me that the relationship between the narrator and the other man, an architect, was “too realized,” by which he meant that the two forged too much of an actual relationship. He was skeptical that my young and attractive architect would get involved with a man as solitary and eccentric and physically unprepossessing as my narrator. The heart of the book, he insisted, was what goes on in the main character’s mind—his longings, fears, and projections—not what might conceivably end up happening in the “real” world. To that end, Jin Soo wanted me to remove many of the scenes in which the two characters interact.

            As a writer who’d always worried that my fictions were meager on story line, I was surprised to be told to remove plot, not add it. But I came to see that Jin Soo was absolutely right. The story of the book was the story of a mind. Once I understood this completely, I had a kind of truth detector against which I could check my revisions.

            It took me a long time to make the necessary changes. Every time I removed or altered an element, something else seemed to fall out of kilter and I wanted to rework that, too. It was like removing one triangle of a quilt thinking I could just stitch in a new one, then realizing, over and over again, that the excision altered the whole pattern.

            Jin Soo let me take the time I needed, which turned out to be two years. In truth, it wasn’t just faith and generosity on his part—he runs other businesses, and was happy to be inattentive to my project for long stretches. But he was sincere in his philosophy that works of fiction have their own imperatives. A funny thing happened as I reworked The Understory: it kept getting shorter. Watching it shrink from conventional-novel to novella length, I fretted that soon I was going to be left with an awfully long short story. Jin Soo urged me not to worry, saying that every book has its own ideal length. (Luckily mine clocked in at 142 pages, just enough to pass as a short novel.)

            My experiences with literary journal editors have been very different, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. With one exception, I’ve never been asked for anything but the most minor changes to my stories or essays--a circumstance I’ve found disappointing, especially when I was younger and hungry for mentors. So, the exception: a well-known journal took a short story of mine, on the condition that I lop off the ending. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, so I agreed.

Later, as we got down to line editing, my editor requested other changes that just didn’t make sense to me. Above all, he wanted to remove a line of dialogue that “didn’t sound like the character.” I felt that the line of dialogue in fact expressed something essential about the character. The editor and I wrangled about this for a while, and finally he offered to send me a version of the passage in question reworked to his satisfaction (taking out the line of dialogue meant having to recast sentences around it). I read the passage, which I tried to but couldn’t make myself swallow. I was about to e-mail the editor telling him so, when I happened to scroll through some previous pages of the story and found that he had made other significant changes that he’d never told me about.

I’ll cut to the chase: I pulled the story. The editor and I got past the changes-without-telling incident (he apologized) but he refused to run the story with the one line of dialogue he disliked, and I couldn’t stand behind the story without it. I was sorry not to appear in this particular journal, but I found a new home for the story within a few weeks.

            It might seem silly that this editor and I fell out over a single sentence—really, over one word. One word! But what else do we writers have besides our words? Money? Glory? Hardly. I admire those editors who can see into the essence of a fiction, who will request demanding or even exhausting changes if they serve that essence, but who will step back when the writer, after honest thought, says, “No. These are the right words.” I’ve worked as an editor myself, and I know this stepping-back is really tough. An editor who can both demand and retreat, each at the right time, is a hero in my book.

 

 

Pamela Erens is the author of The Understory (Ironweed Press), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for a first work of fiction, as well as a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, which honors the best work of fiction by an emerging writer published in the previous two years.  Her short stories and essays have been published in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Redivider, New England Review,  Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is a two-time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship in fiction.

Experiences With Editors - Bonnie Jo Campbell

Happy New Year's Day to the four of you stopping by today!  Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award finalist, chimes in on the importance of copy editors:

When I was finishing up my story collection, American Salvage, I discovered that Wayne State University was in need of copy editors, so I begged them to hire my friend, Heidi Bell, a freelance editor. The Wayne State folks were not entirely comfortable at first with the idea of hiring my friend to edit my book, and the managing editor, the fabulous Kristin Harpster Lawrence, expressed concern that it might even be harmful to our (Heidi’s & my) friendship. However, I already knew how powerful Heidi’s vision is and how much she cared about good writing, and I was so grateful for the opportunity Wayne State gave me to work with her. I’ve been copyedited before at other publishing houses, and usually it has consisted of just some minor corrections and word usage questions, maybe also some questions of consistency. Heidi did that and more. She found every error, and she pointed out to me dozens of places where I was unclear, where I was not doing all I could do with language. She cares ferociously about storytelling and about the English language. I credit her, in no small part, to my getting great reviews and being a National Book Award finalist in 2009. 

My bio: Bonnie Jo Campbell was a 2009 National Book Award finalist for her collection of stories, American Salvage, and she is author of the novel Q Road and the story collection Women & Other Animals. She’s received the AWP Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, the Eudora Welty Prize. Her poetry collection Love Letters to Sons of Bitches won the 2009 CBA Letterpress Chapbook award. Campbell teaches at Pacific University Low Res MFA program.

Experiences With Editors - Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel on working with one specific magazine editor:

I’d like to put forth an appreciation of Robley Wilson, who is one of the under sung heroes of American fiction. A brilliant novelist, short story writer and poet, Robley Wilson was also the editor of the North American Review for more than two decades during its glory years, when the magazine was publishing Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus and a lot of other writers who later became very well known. His magazine was remarkably eclectic (long before I heard the terms “microfiction” and “flash fiction,” he was out there running “four minute fictions”); there was no one style, and along with short stories, readers could find serious nonfiction: essays and reportage. Decades before the green movement, the NAR was paying real attention to the environment. 

One day when I was working as an underling in the fiction department at Redbook, I answered my boss’s phone and it was Robley Wilson. Luckily for me, my boss was out of the office. I ended up having a longish conversation with Robley, after which I decided to risk sending him the short story I had been poking at for three years. I didn’t think he’d say yes but I figured he would be nice enough not to laugh at me and might offer some useful criticism. Several months later—he read everything but was never known for speed—he stunned me by accepting the story. This was over the phone again, and I was so excited that he genially told me to calm down because I was getting only $40. He did not ask for revisions and he did not make changes; instead he told me I had “something” and suggested I find a good teacher. (Translation: Yes, you can do this and yes, you have a long way to go.) Another tip: Tell everyone I was working on a collection because eventually I would have one.

Robley published one more of my stories in the NAR after that, and then I did find a teacher: Gordon Lish. I have thanked Lish a few million times and will probably thank him a few million times more before I check out, but I also want to publicly acknowledge Robley Wilson, whose genius as an editor was to read everything with an open mind and a laser-sharp sharp eye, and to shine a light on the people he believed in. He has long since left the NAR but a few years ago he was guest editing Lost and published one of the stories in my forthcoming collection, again with no changes. He once told me that he would rather live with a story’s flaws than insert himself into the text. Every time I see Robley, which isn’t often, I am surprised all over again by how tall he is and how softly he speaks. In his quiet, hands-off, unassuming way, he launched the careers of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers. As readers and writers, we are in his debt.

Dawn Raffel’s new story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, comes out from Dzanc Books in March, 2010. She is the author of a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division (Knopf) and a novel, Carrying the Body (Scribner).

Experiences With Editors - Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon on the various editors he's had the pleasure of working with:

Though I’ve heard horror stories from other writers, I’ve never had a bad experience with an editor, and, in fact, my work has benefited tremendously from editorial help I’ve received over the years. Carolyn Kuebler at New England Review has an excellent eye for line edits. Chris Chambers at New Orleans Review helped me make the entry to a story much more fluid. Derek White at Sleepingfish asked me to change one word that ran through an entire story—an offensive word that I did not want to change, given my fondness for offensive words. But struggling with that one word forced me to re-imagine the story, and I ultimately discovered the right word that deepened the entire piece. Alison Callahan at HarperCollins provided the most insightful, specific, and useful critical read for Safe in Heaven Dead of any editorial response I’ve ever gotten, and in so doing helped me reanimate and finish that novel. Sharon Dilworth at Autumn House Press had great instinct and advice in helping choose the stories that would ultimately be included in Drift and Swerve.

I’ve only had one experience in which I felt an editor was absolutely wrong about a significant edit. That editor wanted to cut a last line I thought was crucial to the story. Cutting the line would have radically changed the story, I thought. I still feel that way. I said I wouldn’t make the cut, and the editor left it alone. That was the only time I thought the editor didn’t understand the story. Often, they understand it better than I do. 

My second published piece was in StoryQuarterly, when Diane Williams was editing. She chopped four or five pages off the opening—maybe a quarter of the story—and it was a perfect edit, teaching me a lot about point of entry. My strangest, and in many ways best experience with an editor was with Gordon Lish at The Quarterly, where my first published story appeared. I was young and ecstatic that the story had been taken. When I got the proofs, there were several edits  I remember—the word “thighs” was cut, as was some throat-clearing, superfluous language. But what seemed strangest to me then was a comment at the top of page, let’s say 10 of the proof. “Cut three words,” it said. Three words? Any three? I had no idea. I started looking at the page. I mean really looking at that page. I ended up cutting about, I don’t know, maybe forty words and inserting 37 new ones. That would teach him, I thought. When I look at that story today, I still recognize the page Lish made me read so closely. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned about reading and editing my own work from that experience—paying so much attention to every single word—and how cutting one word can cause previous or later sentences to collapse.

I know I’ve been lucky to have had such great editors, and I know that bad ones exist out there. I also know how to say no to an editor, though I haven’t very often, because they’ve usually been right, helping me improve, expand, tighten, and deepen the work, and teaching me something about how to read and understand it. Thanks.

Samuel Ligon is the author of a collection of stories, Drift and Swerve (Autumn House 2009), and a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins 2003).  His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University and is the editor of Willow Springs.

Experiences With Editors - Philip F. Deaver

An experience with a publishing editor from a specific series - the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction - which long-time readers of the EWN know is probably my favorite:

In the fall of 1986, I was notified that my collection Silent Retreats won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.  Melissa Pritchard was a co-winner that year, and the two books resulting, hers (Spirit Seizures) and then mine, would be published by the University of Georgia Press in the ensuing months.  And so according to a plan set up by the press, in mid-summer of ’87 I was contacted by phone by the Flannery O’Connor Award series editor, Charles East.  For the next few weeks, line by line, story by story, we worked through my collection.  We did it all on the phone.  He told me, “Look, we’re going to print this no matter what – so let’s make it as good as it can be.”  I never met him face to face, but after all that time on the phone, his kind, reflective, appreciative voice and vector, I feel to this day that we were very good friends.  His eye for detail was far greater than mine; he saw deep into the stories.  He got the humor.  He appreciated – actually seemed to love – the characters, even the ones I wanted readers to hate.  He was gentle, and at the same time he was exacting.  He caught double meanings of sentences I only saw one way.  Without exception, every change he recommended showed full understanding of my intent and his recommendations showed an appreciation of my writing voice.  I would say we worked about twenty hours over those months, including much time on the phone and then close review of the galleys by mail.  A lot of it was line editing, but he saw conceptual issues and line editing as equal – for him, it was all in the interest of fully realizing and finalizing work that was already “there.”  I’ve had many other editors over the years since, but it is this man’s way with me, his blend of warmth and generosity with unrelenting editorial precision and artistic insight, that I’ve sought to imitate in my work with students and mentees.  After a long illness, Charles East died in early October of this year, and so even though I thanked him many times over the years, it would be crazy for me to miss this EWN opportunity to raise a toast in his memory. 

Phliip F. Deaver is writer in residence at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL and teaches fiction and poetry in the brief residency MFA program at Spalding University.  He is currently back to writing short fiction.  Learn more about him at his website, http://philipfdeaver.com/.