Dead on, Alison. I recall the great writer, Sheila Watson, whose The
Double Hook is a Canadian masterwork that pretty well created the
possibilities for fiction in this country after 1959 when it appeared:
she started & published at her own expense the little magazine White
Pelican with a number of other editors, & argued passionately that
editing was choosing not changing.
It's partly, as you suggest, a stance of trusting the writer to care
enough to send the very best -- so to speak....
And then, do you like it or not...
Doug
On 23-Apr-05, at 4:15 AM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
> On the whole, I'm what you'd call a "passive" editor. I used not to
> be, and
> blush rather when I look back at some of the suggestions I used to
> make to
> hapless poets. On one hand, I will make suggestions where I think a
> work
> might be improved, but these will generally be copy editing type
> questions,
> and usually I won't make any such question about a poem, just about
> prose.
> If I have doubts about a poem, I don't accept it.
>
> I don't think of it as a consumer position. If I invite a contributor
> to
> send me some stuff, I set up a kind of contract of faith between us.
> Part
> of that faith is that I accept that this person is a writer who knows
> what
> he or she is doing. If I don't believe that, why am I publishing their
> work? But another reason I accept wholesale is that I do not look for
> perfection, but something much less easy to define: a sense of life in
> the
> writing, a vitality (I told you it was hard to define, it's hard to
> speak
> outside cliché here) which may mean that something that has flaws
> might be
> chosen because of some other quality that for me shines beyond its
> imperfections. But I don't pretend to publish anything for any reason
> except that I like it (sometimes I think Masthead should be subtitled
> "Stuff
> I Like").
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I don’t need to
hold back here
in the union
of forms
Charles Olson
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