All my work is informed by my training in media studies. The medium is the message. All text is con-text.
As an editor, I approach writing as a strategic site of influence, crisscrossed by discursive fields and loaded with potential counter-valence. Even apolitical work is doing politics. My role is to help you know your impact and maximize the intentionality behind it.
This training also helps us think beyond the text. The medium is the message. All text is con-text. Composing is framing. Writing is resonance.
This why, in addition to editorial work, I am offering creative services to help you tell your story.
All reading is creative: all interpretation is inter-penetration. Reading is a generative act of our whole selves communing with an-other. Readers read themselves through the text; editors are fundamentally professional readers. That means they read themselves too, but their job is to read you and the collective too.
Let me be baroque for a moment. As an editor, my role is to help discern the spirits: to listen for the sacred hum of stories told and ask the questions that bring clarity and conviction to their teller. It is holy work: part acolyte, part priest.
It is also invisible work. Development editing is about having enough voice to be of use to you without drowning out your own. I can’t put my finger on how this works. It’s magick. It’s not of this world. Every time I step into this role, I feel plucked like a string by something vast and unknown—perhaps you feel the same way too, when you write.
My goal is harmony. My role is supporting fiddle. This work isn’t ours alone.
When I think about how I approach a text, I think about my experience as a border crosser, both physically and figuratively; I think about my ancestors who were also border crossers; I think about the stranger in the room.
Sensitivity and authenticity reading is the art of conjuring “strangers,” those whose trust we’ve yet to earn. Sometimes these strangers look like us; sometimes they don’t. Their presence is a gift either way: they mirror back to us our strangeness. They help us to, first, know ourselves.
My role is to walk with you across the border. I don’t do recon; I’m not your “man on the ground.” I am a fellow traveler with experience crossing fault lines and negotiating checkpoints.
It’s your road trip; I ride beside you and point out how words like “shotgun” can sound. It’ll be fun, I promise.