When I call myself an editor, people imagine only the formal process of pruning a manuscript of its idiosyncrasies, red pen in hand, style guide at the ready. The idea of the editor as a partner in the publishing process, while never very widely held, has faded altogether from public consciousness. Once upon a time, editors were the bridge between writers who produced works full of imaginative, nuanced language, and publishers who disseminated such works. Editors invested their time and faith in helping writers make their manuscripts better, then turned to the publishers for whom they worked and, credibility each time at stake, advocated for publication. The steady decline of a reading public and the thorough commodification of literature have removed any lingering popular awareness of where books come from.
The closest we’ve had to a celebrity editor was Maxwell Perkins, who famously worked with literary icons of the 1920s-40s including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. I first heard of Perkins in eighth grade when a representative from the Thomas Wolfe estate spoke at my middle school. Though two hours east of Asheville, the school administration must have nonetheless considered Thomas Wolfe something of a local hero, or in any case was glad to offer a cultural event that didn’t require a costly field trip. The estate’s presentation emphasized Wolfe’s larger-than-life appetites and personality, dwelling in particular on the size of his writing desk and manuscripts measured not by the page but by the crate. Our visitor intended the class to be awed by the caricature of Thomas Wolfe, and I was, but I was also captivated by an offhand reference to Maxwell Perkins.
The story of Perkins and Wolfe working together to cut thousands of words from the writer’s manuscripts prompted my first thoughts about the relationship between writing and editing. I was fascinated by this man, Maxwell Perkins, who would devote so much of himself to the words of his challenging author. Knowing nothing more about Perkins or the publishing industry, and even more naive about writers and their work, I wanted to forge that same kind of relationship with the writers I hoped someday to meet. The biography by A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, did little to dissuade me, despite its less idealized portrait of the editor as a lonely workaholic who drank too much.
I pursued my vocation sidelong through college, cobbling together elements of an editor’s education within the scope of my university’s creative writing program. Professors at UNC Asheville accommodated my nontraditional learning goals in ways that would never have been possible outside a small liberal arts university. Writing workshops were for me an opportunity to join a community of writers and hone both my tact and my editorial sensibility. I wrote fiction and poetry of my own as a means to that end.
Through UNCA’s creative arts magazine, Headwaters, I explored the craft of book production with other students and a faculty advisor. We learned desktop publishing software on the fly on a 5-year-old Mac running System 7. We learned the impossibility of reliably judging submissions on the basis of creative merit. In the years when we weren’t causing scandals (we put a black and white photo of a masturbating man on the cover one year), we developed ingenious marketing campaigns to get the campus community’s attention. My time spent on Headwaters (often to the exclusion of my classes) cemented my desire to seek a career in publishing: I loved the patient negotiations with writers and staff, the late nights reconciling too many deadlines, and the simple joy of opening the first box of a new edition and smelling its pages.
