Inspiration from a literary legend
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Hi Reader, Last week I read an interview that Anne Helen Petersen did with Sara B. Franklin, author of the newly released book The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. Maybe you don’t know who any of these women are, but Anne Helen Petersen’s Substack newsletter, Culture Study, is one of my favorites (she also wrote the article about millennials being the burnout generation that went viral a few years ago). I didn’t know who Sara B. Franklin was before reading this interview, but she is an author and oral historian. And Judith Jones? Well, if you had said that name to me I would have shrugged, but I absolutely do know who she is. I just didn’t recognize her name. You may be surprised to find that you know who she is too, if you’ve seen the HBO series Julia, about the life of renowned American cookbook author Julia Childs, because Judith Jones was Julia Childs’ editor and she’s a prominent character in the show. I remember watching this show a few years ago being amazed by this woman who was editing cookbooks and managing Julia Childs’ flamboyant personality all while fielding phone calls from her other authors—like John Updike (who also makes an appearance in the show). I was in awe at the kind of editor who could shift back and forth between the technical, instructional writing of a cookbook manuscript and the sophisticated, likely heady prose of a literary manuscript. She’s a genius, I thought. Fast forward to last week when I read about Sara B. Franklin’s new book detailing Judith Jones’ life and I was even more enthralled. A little known fact that I learned: Although she did not edit it, Judith Jones is the one who discovered the manuscript for The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile. Reading this interview has had me thinking deeply for several days about the role and the work of an editor. How the work of an editor is to draw stories out of the writers they work with, and how it can be subversive work in a lot of ways (more on that in a minute). Of course I think about this often, since that’s the work I’ve dedicated myself to in this life, and I frequently talk about how being an editor is much more than marking up a page of text. I like to say that the work of an editor is strategic, which can be applied to so much more than only the written word. It’s about discerning what is important, what requires emphasis, and what can be eliminated. It’s about identifying priorities and making decisions about order and organization so that attention—whether your own or your audience’s—gets directed to where you want to focus. Talking about this kind of strategic, editorial work makes sense in the context of writing because we’re dealing with something tangible: written material that appears on a page as blocks of text that can be rearranged, reordered, deleted, and rewritten. It gets harder to conceptualize when talking instead about ideas, your personal goals, your time, your tasks for a given day. The abstract brain gymnastics of figuring out what to do with yourself, your life become easier to perform and workout with the help of an editor, as Sara B. Franklin describes of her relationship with Judith Jones: “. . . Judith became a mentor and beloved friend. She became, in many ways, my editor, too; observing, listening, drawing me out. Helping me discern, organize, and prioritize. She helped me—with such grace and lightness of touch that I hardly recognized it at the time—understand where I might cut, and to what I ought to pay more attention, expand. Not in my writing, in my life.” I read this and thought, YES. This is exactly what I aspire to in my own work. As I have been working on revamping my business to be more manageable and sustainable in the wake of the MS relapse I experienced at the end of August 2022, I’ve often been asked questions such as, Can you read and give feedback to clients without all the in-person work of group calls, office hours, one-on-one meetings? While that may be more efficient in some ways, and less time- or energy-consuming, my answer has and always will be: no. What Sara B. Franklin describes in the quote above is receiving feedback and perspective from Judith Jones that can only happen because they have created safe space within their relationship for that exchange to happen—Judith can only offer the feedback when she knows Sara well enough; and Sara can only receive it when she feels safe enough. Further in the interview, Sara explains Judith’s thoughts on relationships being essential to her work: “In my conversations with her, Judith insisted on getting across that this work was carried out in, and by way of, relationship: hers with each of her individual authors, and those authors as a group. She spent a great deal of time facilitating bonds and resource-sharing between her cookbook authors, introducing them to one another, inviting them to one another’s launches and events, encouraging them to learn from one another’s challenges and successes, both in the kitchen and in the wider world. Judith saw clearly the catty competitiveness that emerged as the food world grew and became more commercial, and she was intent on countering it, even if only among the relatively small number of people with whom she had sway, by helping foster a community that was more mutually supportive.” Again I found myself nodding, thinking of the need for mutual support among women in the writing and publishing world, and how I aim to foster it by creating community for my clients and the writers and staff I work with on Under the Gum Tree, the literary arts magazine that I publish. From learning about Judith as an editor in an HBO TV series to this short interview, the woman has become such an inspiration to me (that, yes, I have already ordered the book about her life.) And there is so much more than what I’ve shared here, including her subtle subversiveness that Ialluded to, which Sara explains here: “For Judith, helping publish books that give voice to what, why, and how we cook and eat was a way of making space for people who, otherwise, would unlikely be heard from and/or accepted into the public sphere: Judith edited many books about food written by women at a time when it was much easier and more common for men to be published. She also worked on culinary titles by queer men, divorced and single mothers, people who’d fled their homes due to religious and political persecution; a granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, people for whom English was not their native tongue, upwardly mobile people, downwardly mobile people, and an early victim of AIDS.” It sounds to me like Judith was ahead of her time, championing underrepresented voices before it was in vogue. When I think about this woman working with her list of authors as Sara describes them, it sounds like the same kind of people we need stories from today. I don’t work for a publisher, so I don’t have the same kind of power or clout that Judith had, but in my own way I feel proud that I’m doing similar work—the work of drawing out stories from people, from women, who, for whatever reason, haven’t felt comfortable or confident or safe enough to do so. In other words, I feel a deep kinship with this literary legend, as if we both have been on a mission to share stories without shame. Janna p.s. I have a free 90-minutes masterclass for women writing nonfiction that hasn’t been available for three years. Click here to watch (immediately or anytime that works for you!) if you’re interested. |