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How I Became an EditorDecember 18, 2009 From To Be Rather Than to Seem: A Writer's Education. I got hired as a secretary at the Red Cross not long after I moved back to D.C., in the spring of 1977. I started in Publications almost exactly two years later, and left the Red Cross almost exactly two years after that, in May 1981. I'd been a clerical worker at American Red Cross national headquarters for two years when an opening was posted for editor in the publications office. The problems were several, among them my ignorance of what editors did and the organization's barbed-wire barrier between the clerical ranks and the professional, to which category "editor" belonged. I was, however, a pretty good writer, and like any competent secretary I had written, rewritten, and edited plenty of memos and reports, often under the guise of transcribing or typing them. Betty O., the head of the Office of Personnel Training and Development, where I was then a staff assistant, and Thom H., my immediate supervisor (two of the best colleagues I've ever had), both encouraged me to apply, and leaned on me hard when I dragged my feet. I applied. I aced the test and acquitted myself honorably in the interview. The publications people wanted to hire me. Then the process hit a major roadblock: the personnel staffing specialist in charge of professional positions. This individual didn't believe anyone should get a five-grade promotion, especially a secretary who occasionally wore T-shirts to work. She didn't like it that the candidates she'd referred for the job had all been passed over, including the guy with the Harvard PhD. A college degree was required for professional-grade jobs, she announced, certain that this was going to nix the upstart's promotion once and for all -- then I produced my magna cum laude BA from the University of Pennsylvania. All the while, my future colleagues in publications and my soon-to-be-former colleagues in the training office were making phone calls, pulling strings, and refusing to back down. Finally the staffing specialist gave up. The promotion went through. For the next two years I commuted from Mount Pleasant, D.C., to Old Town Alexandria, where the publications office was located. Often I rode my trusty Peugeot bicycle, Blue Mist II. When the weather was bad, I took public transportation: bus to metro to bus -- the metro only went as far as National Airport in those days. By either method it took about an hour each way. The office was a big high-ceilinged oblong, informally divided lengthwise by file cabinets and bookshelves, with production on one side and editorial on the other. I occupied one of five cubicles on the editorial side. The senior editor held down one end of the row. At the other end, in the cubicle next to mine, Sylvia A. presided. She had worked in New York publishing. She was part of the crew that produced the first American Heritage Dictionary. The American Red Cross published textbooks and reference materials for its various courses in first aid, CPR, water safety, and the like, and most of them had to be revised periodically to keep up with scientific and technical developments. This was almost a full-time job in itself, and book production schedules left little time free for the reports, pamphlets, brochures, posters, and forms that made up the rest of the office's output. So Sylvia was a three-quarter-time freelancer who edited books and only books. Though outside the official hierarchy, she was the voice of editorial authority in the publications office. As each job came into the office, it was assigned to an editor, and that editor managed it through the publication process until it went to the printer. This involved working with the artist-designers and the production team, and occasionally pinch-hitting as a proofreader. The proofreaders worked in pairs, with one reading aloud not only the words but the punctuation marks, capital letters, and other typographical details and the other marking deviations on the proof. Photocomposition was gaining ground, but hot type wasn't dead yet, so I learned to spot the kinds of errors that rarely if ever happen with "cold type," like inverted letters and stray characters from the wrong font. Most important, I had to clear each manuscript I edited face-to-face with its author. Like as not, this was the individual in the originating office who knew the subject best or who didn't duck fast enough when the boss was looking for a volunteer. Some were capable, others were less so, and some of the least capable were the touchiest about being edited. During my two years as a staff editor, I learned how to present and if necessary advocate for my edits clearly and tactfully. I began to develop the habit of editing as if I'd eventually have to explain everything I'd done to a skeptical and possibly hostile author. These days I'm rarely face-to-face with the writers whose manuscripts I work on, and sometimes I have no contact with them at all, but that habit has served me well. Like many novice editors I did succumb later to "piss on fire hydrant syndrome," where I didn't think I'd done my job if I hadn't left my mark somewhere, but I managed to get over it without pissing too many people off. Sylvia had no official responsibility for training or supervising editors, but she took me on as a protégée. She answered my incessant questions, checked the snarly passages that I wasn't sure I'd untangled, showed me what she was working on and explained why she'd handled a sentence this way and not that. She was demanding, she was precise, and she was opinionated. So was I, but our most opinionated opinions coincided much more often than not. She, however, thought nonsexist language was a travesty, and I of course considered it an obligation moral as well as political. We managed to agreeably disagree, but not without occasional needling back and forth. When I started work in the publications office, I was promising raw material. When I left, I was a competent journeyman editor. The office deserves some credit, but Sylvia deserves most of it. My colleagues were a diverse lot. Some of us were downright eccentric, like Jim the production manager, who wore his Arkansas Razorbacks blazer whenever the team had a big game coming up and called certain co-workers by nicknames not of their choosing, often to their great annoyance. But we worked together well, even under pressure, and the camaraderie was real. The skunk in the works was Frank, the second in command. Frank had been such a disastrous editor that a position was created for him as "chief of publications development," meaning he now supervised both the editorial and the graphics sections. In that august position he did, quite literally, nothing, though occasionally we'd have to do damage control when he promised someone that a six-month job could be completed in six weeks. Frank walked tilted slightly backwards as if to keep his large stomach from pulling his nose down to the carpet. Not only did he love to eat, he loved to tell people what he had eaten. Many a Monday morning, especially after major holidays, would find Frank visiting each cubicle and section in turn to regale us with his most recent gustatory adventure. None of us wanted to hear it, of course, but he was the boss. Finally I went round the office in his wake and made each of my co-workers tell me what they'd had for dinner the previous evening. I typed it up neatly, Jim procured a picture frame, and I left the result on Frank's desk. That ended the gastronomic recitations. Frank had been in the organization for at least seventeen years, all of them lackluster or worse. Instead of being warned to shape up or, if that failed, fired, he'd be promoted or laterally transferred to another office, always with a glowing work performance review to cover the ass of whoever hadn't had the nerve to confront him with his incompetence. At some point firing him became inconceivable. Frank was gay, D.C.'s human rights act included sexual orientation among its protected categories, and if anyone had mustered the courage to force his resignation, Frank could have pointed to the paper trail indicating that he was an exemplary employee and made a pretty good case that he was being discriminated against. I was young, a neophyte in the ways of corporate life, and rational to a fault. Eventually it dawned on me that all the higher-ups knew how incompetent Frank was and they were OK with it. I was outraged. So were most of the other editors, and Jim the production manager, whose contempt for Frank was so great that he was frequently rude to his face. On particularly bad days we'd take a long lunch at the Holiday Inn or the Ramada Inn nearby; I'd return to my desk fortified with at least one and sometimes two or three gin and tonics. After an especially infuriating day, I'd make the bike trip home to Mount Pleasant in forty-five minutes instead of the usual fifty-five. Something had to give. Either I had to reconcile myself to gross incompetence triumphant or I had to get out of there. I quit. I had saved enough money to take a few months off to work on what was going to be my first novel (hah! it isn't done yet, and probably never will be). But a few weeks later, at my thirtieth birthday party, Mary Farmer, owner of Lammas, D.C.'s feminist bookstore, asked if I'd come to work as the store's book buyer. I'd call it a dream come true if I'd ever had the chutzpah to dream such a thing.
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