Towards a poetics of editing for the twenty-first century

Robert Gottlieb said that ‘the editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one but invisible or not, the implication is nonetheless that it should exist’. This article examines the writer–editor relationship that Gottlieb describes as ‘fraught with difficulty’ (but equally encouraging of what Toni Morrison calls ‘imaginative recklessness’) from the perspective, as Barthes might have it, of both the ‘ones who write’ and also ‘the ones who rewrite’. As editors for the journals Short Fiction and Two Thirds North and published short story writers, ourselves, we reflect on contemporary reading aesthetics as much as creative practice, with specific reference to published stories in draft and final-edit forms in order to work towards piecing together a poetics of editing in relation to short fiction

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Order (exchange · Perspective (graphical · Poetics · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Recklessness · Relation (database · Visual arts · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology