Detox

Scottish poet Robin Robertson earns his living as a fiction editor at Jonathan Cape. He has a tip for aspiring writers:

If I could advise all of your younger readers, I would tell them not to go into publishing or into academia if you are writing. It's difficult, because if you're working at close quarters with text during the day, the last thing you really want to do, or the last thing you really can do in the evening is to turn your mind to your own work, because you've too many other voices in your head if you've been doing your job properly and are deep into editing and the deconstruction of a text. Your mind, then, is somebody else's. That has been an impediment. I mean, I enjoy my job and working with the 50 or so authors I look after, but it takes me a couple of weeks to detox from their creativity and try and turn my mind to my own.

If One Poet Edits Another, Whose Poem is It?

A piece on the "unseen hands" behind poetry publishing. One of the many money quotes:

“We have great old scraps,” says Robertson [of editor Don Paterson], who, in turn, runs the poetry list at Jonathan Cape and edits John Burnside (this year’s TS Eliot and Forward Prize winner). “He makes some very good suggestions, about 50 per cent of which I accept. He takes the same position I do: if the writer wants to make a mistake badly enough he should be allowed to make it.”