Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing

Editors in Writing Studies

Greg Giberson, Megan Schoen, Christian Weisser, Greg Giberson, Megan Schoen, Christian Weisser

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781646422173
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Until now there has been little consideration of the intellectual and historical impact editors have had on the young and ever-evolving field of writing studies. Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing provides new and seasoned scholars with behind-the-scenes explorations and expositions of the history of scholarly editing and the role of the scholarly editor from the perspectives of current and former editors from important publications within the field.
 
Each chapter in the collection examines the unique experiences and individual contributions of its authors during their time as editors, offering advice to scholars and potential editors on how to navigate the publication process and understand editorial roles. The contributors provide multiple perspectives on the growth, transformation, and, in some cases, founding of some of the most influential publishing venues in writing studies.
 
The personal and historical narratives, along with the unique perspectives and insightful analyses of the individual authors in Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing, offer needed transparency and context to what has historically been an opaque, yet inevitable and consequential, part of academic life. This volume will help researchers in the field understand the publishing process.
 
Contributors: Cheryl Ball, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, Jean Ferguson Carr, Douglas Eyman, Muriel Harris, Byron Hawk, Alice Horning, Paul Kei Matsuda, Laura Micciche, Mike Palmquist, Michael Pemberton, Malea Powell, Kelly Ritter, Victor Villanueva, Victor Vitanza, Kathleen Blake Yancey
 

Part One

Editing Journals in Writing Studies

1

The Journal You Have

Kelly Ritter

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781646422173.c001

My origin story, as both an editor and a scholar, is framed by a life lived outside the typical pathways to academia. I come from a working-class family. I was a first-generation student who began my PhD largely ignorant of what the professorial life would entail, though I knew I was interested in teaching and, somewhat secondarily, research and scholarship. I was also trained as more of a poet than a scholar. My undergraduate degree in English was characterized by that cafeteria-style curriculum of the 1980s, which gave me an unreasonable amount of freedom to take writing courses over period-based literature or theory courses. And both my graduate degrees are in creative writing. Entering my first full-time (non-tenure-track) faculty job at the age of twenty-seven, I had little idea of what my career would look like, or whether I would have one at all.

In these years since—including the initial leap onto the tenure track, and intentional (self-) retraining from creative writing to rhetoric and composition, and the sheer will to often tip the delicate balance between “work” and “life” (as if those categories were ever mutually exclusive)—I have found myself a tenured professor with a respectable publication record, standing in my field, and a career now chiefly in administration. But the trajectory that truly set this course I’m currently on began one late December evening in 2011 after I returned from a pleasant but by no means uniformly awesome interview at the NCTE convention in Orlando, Florida, for the position of next editor of College English. I opened an email that began Congratulations!, and I was astounded at my sudden good fortune, if a little terrified at the prospect. At that point—as fellow editors know—the proverbial needle skidded off the record and the direction of my professional life, as well as my perspective on the profession, changed, essentially for good.

I was privileged to be the editor of College English from 2012 to 2017, across two faculty appointments and institutional structures (the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign). I was the third woman to hold this position and, from what I can ascertain, also one of the youngest to do so. It’s not that being an editor of this, or any, academic journal would be considered a disruption to, or a departure from, what most would label a successful career. In fact, many senior scholars find themselves in leadership positions of this sort around the time they achieve the rank of full professor. Such is the duty of being “senior”: an elder, safe on the other side of the career mountain, who has made it over the peak and now is responsible for pulling others up behind them. To become an editor is not unusual, or, for some, even wholly unexpected. Rather, becoming and being an editor require a surprisingly dramatic shift of expectations—of one’s self, of others—that fairly irreparably changes the way your career moves forward and how you view the arena of scholarly publication in relation to it.

As I’ve written elsewhere,1 being an editor means you may no longer be (just) yourself. But being an editor also means you will forever look at your work, and the work of others, with a set of newly opened eyes. You will understand the front and the back of the house equally, in theatre terms. You will reposition yourself in your field—whatever it is—now realizing your research agenda may be far different from everyone else’s, or right in line with the crowd, and/or a trend, fad, or wave amongst other waves equally powerful and quick, bright yet fleeting arrhythmic tsunamis. You will ultimately realize that regardless of what or how much it has meant to the field, your research doesn’t matter to how you must be an editor now. Your scholarly identity cannot and should not guide the way you edit the journal you have been assigned for safekeeping. Instead, your role is surprisingly prescribed: you can only accept the work you are sent, reject the work that won’t fit (and come to understand that not everything rejected is not good), and edit the journal you have.

My editorial philosophy, born of these limitations and realizations, is fairly simple. Unlike how you have chosen to make your career through your own scholarship—the questions you want to answer or the problems you want to solve—the journal you edit is beholden to its readers and other field stakeholders. It is not yours. It is not a publication you mold into the one you personally or professionally want as rooted in your own particular positionality in the field. And it will live and thrive long after you are gone—unless you are the founding and only editor of a publication whose ongoing livelihood therefore depends upon you. That particular editorial experience is beyond my ken; all I will say here is that a publication, position, program—really anything controlled by and dependent upon one person—must be especially vigilant about its relevance, internal health, and viability. Such a philosophy that privileges the greater good is part and parcel, I argue, for leadership work in general in academia.

Maybe it’s just old age talking (I turned fifty-two last December), but rarely does good come from a vision that is the conjuring of one person and what they want. Editors do not move the field so much as move with it. In this, I follow M. H. Abrams’s (1958) terms of the mirror over the lamp. It’s important for editors to realize the journal they have is the one they must edit, especially when working as part of an organization, such as NCTE, that has some visionary and fiduciary control over what the journal means and what it is. And it’s important for authors, and manuscript readers, to remember as they navigate the review and publication process that no editor is a Supreme Being.

When I began as editor, I knew a lot about my field, but I didn’t know much about this kind of leadership role. I was still figuring out how I wanted to balance procedural items, for example. What would be my stated response time for reading and responding to manuscripts? Who would serve as my assistant editors, my right-hand people? How would I handle revise-and-resubmit decisions, recalcitrant readers or authors (luckily, those were extremely rare in my years with CE), and other logistics? These felt like enormous responsibilities for which I needed consultation and advice from colleagues. Fortunately, this help I readily received. But as far as the “vision” thing, I had one holistic wish, likely born of my background as a creative writer and my current scholarly bent as a historian of writing programs and pedagogy (which revealed the many intertwined reasons the past really does shape the present): I really, really wanted to change the title of the journal, straight away.

College English. “What does that even mean anymore?,” I asked out loud, smug in my progressive stance on disciplinary histories. So many departments, it’s true, are no longer called “English,” evident at the very least by the history of work in rhetoric and composition (or writing studies, if you prefer—though of course that is not precise and equivalent nomenclature, either; such is the fate of naming progress) within English departments. There is little in colleges and universities today exactly equivalent to the study of English, as this category of study itself no longer means what it did in, say, the nineteenth century, when such departments came into institutional prominence and when English became as legitimate a field of study as others on the elite college map. And furthermore, “English” as a term is often not readily inclusive of the other cultures and perspectives that now constitute the people and the work of our twenty-first-century English departments. But College English, as I have written about elsewhere,2 has had a long and storied history as the college publication—a sort of spin-off, in modern terms—of an even older NCTE publication, English Journal. So readers have come to it for these past seventy-odd years with certain expectations—each with their own internal truths as readers. And having that “big-tent” title allowed a kind of open, welcoming stance wherein many authors could see themselves in the publication in ways that, say, The Wallace Stevens Journal did not (no offense to any Stevens scholars out there). Changing the name now would mean changing a lot of things far beyond the scope of my lone editorial appointment—because what we call something matters.

So, I quickly determined that pursuing a name change was out. Vision #1: Fail. But I was not going to be that editor who upended the publication structures and histories of NCTE with one fell swoop, and I wasn’t going to close doors to authors and scholarship I had not yet met. I won’t rule out that such a global visioning change might eventually come for CE. But I realized I would need to instead grapple with the journal I had, which was an extremely capacious publication possessing an airplane-hangar capacity of a title. CE was and is a journal that has emphasized (and deemphasized) certain aspects of English studies over its seven-decade run but was at the time of my editorship seen as chiefly a venue for scholars in rhetoric and composition and associated subfields to publish groundbreaking research related to writing, language, culture, and pedagogy. Or at least that had been my relationship to the journal as a two-time contributor, one-time guest editor of a special issue, and an avid subscriber for the twenty-plus years I had been in the profession, including during my doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. CE was where I had published my early scholarship on creative writing pedagogy, my first “major” article publication, shortly before also landing my first tenure-track job. I came into the editorship thinking I had been so, so lucky. The journal had, in many ways, helped launch my career. I was lucky that with its low acceptance rate and tough and brilliant editor (Jeanne Gunner), I was let into the club where, surely, the lines were long outside of those the bouncers had summarily turned away. And surely, I imagined, Jeanne herself was actively shaping the journal’s content from an overwhelming sea of competing manuscripts, choosing only those that struck her fancy, or met with her own scholarly preferences, in order to shape the journal’s issues as she solely wished.

To be fair—and to clarify how my imagination works, too frequently in relation to my own variable self-esteem—this is how I thought all publications worked, across the board, when I began my career. Publishing was good fortune and kind fates, and maybe a little bit of magic, far less than the value of my or anyone’s contribution to a body of scholarship, or line of research. I thought little of supply and demand in the mundane sense, of the work and churn of scholarship moving its way through and among editors of journals and reviewers. And I never imagined truly good scholarly work (by other people, of course) was ever, finally, rejected. I had been (minimally) trained, as a junior scholar, to carefully study the backgrounds and publications of the editors to whom I was submitting my work before targeting a venue. Looking at literary magazines even earlier than this—when I was in graduate school and still thinking I would make a living writing poetry and creative nonfiction and teaching creative writing to undergraduates in a lovely little liberal arts college—I had found this assumption in most cases to hold true.

As an MFA student and, to a lesser extent, later as a PhD candidate (since by then I had a couple of literature and rhetoric faculty helping me develop publications outside poetry, in preparation for a broader career), I was trained to always have my work in circulation. I was to always start at the top of the magazine food chain and ruthlessly work my way downward through it (send to Big Journal One and Big Journal Two, and when they reject your poems in a week, don’t delay—send them some more!). Always, always be In The Churn, because on any given day, you might look “right” to an editor, sort of like the underlying eat-or-be-eaten theme of representations of the Life of an Artist (see, for example, A Chorus Line). So I learned Magazine X, with its history of privileging language poetry, would not look kindly on my New York School-influenced work, for example. Nor would Journal Z, with its family-tree-like, traceable list of published authors who were born into fame and bred for it, be interested in a twenty-three-year-old woman with only a handful of poems published in her career, even if she was getting her MFA from Iowa (and there’s a whole other essay about the anxiety of influence and graduate school and academic careers that focuses on this, but luckily, that’s not the purpose of this collection).

Further, working as an assistant manuscript reader on the Iowa Review—my first foray into the world of publishing as an MFA student—I witnessed the graduate student editors in charge push and pull poems and short stories to and from the final reject pile we lower-level assistants created. This was done in a manner that seemed to rely heavily on aesthetic preferences and not much on qualitative, holistic discussion about overall issue composition, various schools, movements, or styles represented in the work. Such a position was a funny job for someone like me, whose working-class family made its decisions based on logic and practicality. I thought there was a system and that it could be learned; I still took notes on responses to other students’ poems in graduate workshops and tried to apply them regula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: The Shape of Editorial Work
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Consider the Role of Editor?
• Part One: Editing Journals in Writing Studies
• Part Two: Editing Books and Book Series in Writing Studies
• Part Three: Pulling Back the Curtain: Reflections on Editing in Writing Studies
• Index