Inside the Journal Editor’s Office: A 2007 CELJ Roundtable

CELJ’s express mission is to support the work – what many of us consider the still under-sung work – of scholarly journal editors in the humanities. And much of what we do – at MLA, on our Web site, on our discussion list – goes to that mission. But in all the council does, we are constantly and, I would say, equally mindful that our professional well-being is closely bound up with the well-being of our contributors. To put it another way, editing is a profoundly relational enterprise. I’m tempted to break into a chorus of ‘We Are Family’ here, and I’ll spare the readers of JSP that, but I will hazard a domestic metaphor and say that conference sessions like the one from which the following essays are drawn, along with CELJ’s ‘Chat with an Editor’ service and the resources for authors available at our Web site, are meant to keep the house of editing open, doors unlocked and windows unshuttered, to invite not only our editorial but also our authorial kin to come in and talk about what sustains us all: the sharing and vetting and circulation of ideas dished up in well-seasoned prose – or poetry, for some of our creative-writing colleagues.

At the 2007 MLA convention in Chicago, CELJ sponsored three sessions: an awards ceremony with keynote address delivered by Lindsay Waters (a version of which also appears in this issue of JSP) and two roundtables that gave attendees a look ‘inside the editorial office’ – one offering advice to new journal editors and another ranging across a plenitude of interests to quicken the tastes of authors and editors alike. The collection of essays below reconvenes the company from the second roundtable, and it begins, aptly, in a spirit of adventure – with Richard Kopley’s story of the thrill that can come, as it has for him in the co-editorship of Resources in American Literary Studies, with searching the field for new finds and helping the scholarly prospectors responsible for those finds bring them fully to light. Pursuit of the unknown blends thrill with trepidation for graduate students newly engaged as editorial associates, says Jessica Schubert McCarthy, speaking from her own experiences at ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism. On the verge of entering the profession, these valued partakers in the life of the journal office stand in a uniquely ‘intermediary’ position: while learning, from an ‘insider’ perspective, to be the scholars that editors seek – and, in some cases, to become editors themselves – they can draw aside the veil for other aspiring academics and teach their editors and mentors a thing or two along the way. For those interested in the path to journal editing, there is at least one place to acquire specialized education in tandem with practical experience (an extended and more systematic version of what McCarthy describes) – as introduced here by Kent Calder, who at the time of the 2007 MLA convention was director of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University and editor of Documentary Editing (the journal of the Association for Documentary Editing). ASU’s SP Program enjoys an unusual collaboration with a university-level editorial office established to support multiple journals: graduate student interns work with faculty editors and authors in a model of intellectual community that could enliven the culture of scholarly publishing if taken up at other universities. In the essay that comes next, Mary Mekemson of Contemporary Literature brings into sharp relief the experiences of several scholars with advanced degrees in literature and history, herself (and myself) included, who have found their independent way to full-time journal editing – a professional calling still somewhat uncommon in the humanities but surely, she argues, one well worth promoting. Turning to a matter in which both editors and scholarly writers at all stages have a stake and a responsibility, Jeffrey R. Di Leo (editor of American Book Review and symplokē) considers with searching eye the fate of the book review. Making his way through the pitfalls and complications of the subject, Di Leo...