Introversion/Extroversion: The Work of Editing

In 2015 ATHE’s Excellence in Editing Award honored “sustained career achievement in editing.” Penny Farfan, whose acceptance speech from the awards ceremony on July 30, 2015, is reprinted below, serves as a paradigmatic example of what this award represents. She has been a prominent editor in the field of theatre and performance studies, from her tenure at Theatre Journal (2010–13), to her role as coeditor, with Lesley Ferris, of Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (2013). She has also served as a curator, mentor, and generous advisor to many scholars and editors in her circles. As with all entries in this section here also of Theatre Topics, the publication of Farfan’s award speech is meant to archive a live event—the reception of an honor shared among a room of colleagues at the ATHE conference in Montreal. It is also included, however, to acknowledge the centrally important, yet often under-recognized labor of editing. Farfan’s efforts are emblematic of the crucial contributions of editors and have played an important role in the ongoing production of knowledge in our field.

—G.A.

Thank you, Jocelyn,¹ for this introduction, and thanks to ATHE for this wonderful recognition of my work as an editor. I’m truly honored and thrilled to receive this award.

In my first editorial for Theatre Journal, I noted that the word edit means “to put forth” the work of others, but that the work of editing might also be said to “bring forth” the editor. A journal editor reads large numbers of submissions and learns something from all of them, whether they’re published or not; the editor of a book curates an ideal list of contributors to write on subjects of compelling interest; an encyclopedia editor commissions jewel-like essays by experts on the subjects in question; a book review editor persuades scholars to distill and engage their colleagues’ newest work. I’ve learned a huge amount about our field through doing these different kinds of editing work.

But there is another sense in which editing “brings forth” the editor. Beyond the long hours necessarily spent alone in front of a computer—correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, and format; polishing and clarifying prose; checking page proofs—there’s a social and creative dimension of editing that makes the more tedious part worthwhile. An editor conceptualizes projects; brings together the right mix of people to realize the project as fully as possible; and collaborates with those people to achieve the full potential of their work and to integrate their distinct individual contributions into a larger, cohesive work of scholarship, whether that’s an edited volume of essays, a themed journal issue, a general issue of a journal with a particular mandate and reputation, an encyclopedia, or a book review section.

Working on various editing projects from my office in Calgary in western Canada over the years, I’ve found myself “brought forth” into a large international network of coeditors, authors, peer reviewers, readers, and graduate students wanting to learn about publishing articles. As I wrote in my final editorial for Theatre Journal, I feel like I’ve gotten to know a lot of people through their work, even though I haven’t met all of them in person. Editing, then, is a kind of large-scale conversation, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, but in all respects a “bringing forth” from the more solitary and introverted work of scholarly research.

My thanks to the many authors whose work I’ve had the privilege of publishing over the years and to the other editors I’ve had the good fortune of working with, particularly Lesley Ferris, Julia Walker, Catherine Schuler, Ric Knowles, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and Katherine Kelly. And thank you again to ATHE, as well as to all those who surprised me with this nomination, and to the Excellence in Editing Award committee for recognizing my work with this prestigious award.