In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Good-bye to an Editor
  • David Gessner

Over the last few years I have sometimes been listed on the Ecotone masthead as Editor-in-Chief. I like that, in a vain sort of way. “In-Chief” sounds powerful, something writers seldom get to sound. It makes me want to roll up my sleeves and smoke cigars, maybe even start bossing people around like Lou Grant or Perry White at the Daily Planet. It fulfills something in me, satisfies my inner businessman.

But it isn’t exactly true: at heart I’m not really an editor, let alone an In-Chief. What I am, really, is a writer who has been lucky enough, while working with the original grad student editors of this magazine, Heather Wilson and Kimi Faxon Hemingway, to create a vision of a journal that focuses on place, and on nature, too, but on both in a way that isn’t as restricted as I often found the genres of place and nature writing to be. And then lucky enough to work with a series of great student editors, including Jay Varner, Brian Sandala, and Adam Petry, as the journal began to grow into something special.

It turned out my luck was just starting. In 2008 we hired Ben George as our editor, not a student editor this time but someone who had already earned his professional chops at Tin House magazine. Immediately things around here changed. I’d had a general vision of what the journal could be, but now Ben made that hazy vision into something particular and concrete. He went after writers to fill these pages, some famous, some of whom I had never heard of, but almost all of whom blew me away. Emily Smith, who is both the publisher of Lookout Books and the art director of the magazine, had long wanted to revamp the journal’s look and with Ben on board, sneaking glances over her shoulder, she and student protégé Amanda González-Moreno set about re-designing—new logotype, larger trim size, pull quotes, new typeface, large art spreads—until the magazine began to look like the one you are holding in your hands.

What was obvious from the start was this: Ben cared. He cared about every single page, in the way of a real editor, and mulled them over and worked obsessively to get them right. He was a little crazy about it, too, in a way that reminded me of what my father had once called me, “good crazy,” and in the [End Page 5] same way I still get about writing books. In fact, that was one of the pleasures of watching him work. I was used to being around writers, people who cared dearly about their own sentences, but here was someone different: someone who cared about other people’s sentences! Not that he was selfless: for him editing was a mission, a purpose, as clearly as writing is for me.

Ben George is now leaving us, heading into the dark but exciting canyons of New York City. Perhaps that is where he belongs; perhaps that is the natural habitat for an editing animal. But we can’t help but be a little sad around here. Not long after he announced that he was leaving, I happened to be walking in the Colorado foothills with Reg Saner, whose work Ben had edited for us. When I told Reg the news, he sighed out “Oh no,” as if some small tragedy had transpired. What was that “Oh no” about? It was about the fact that Reg, whose work is so refined and meticulous that I wouldn’t edit it with a ten foot pole, had received his essay back from Ben covered with chicken scratch notes, scores of notes written in pencil, not typed in the cold boxes of Track Changes, suggestions and questions and ideas on how to make the piece even better. That “Oh no” said “This sort of care is something rare in this day and age.” That “Oh no” was about appreciating commitment, dedication, near fanaticism toward an elegant end.

This was with Reg Saner mind you, a writer whose first...

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