#dwf16

hi everyone my name is Ellis Grundy and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to this digital writers festival event this afternoon we’re going to be talking about editing and how I editors are invisible what are they exiting at writers and for editors this has partly come about a follow-on project that I’m doing with Elizabeth 10 for the festival on story Elizabeth has written called Lola and Calliope a you can correct me on the pronunciation Elizabeth I think it’s a variety it it’s okay hey and we’re joining poets Oh moussaka and Caitlin mailing how they go on your surname day i’ma ah sake us seka thank you so introductions Caitlin is a WA but who’s to conversations I’ve never had came out in 2015 and a follow-up collection border crossing is due out in febuary through Fremantle press Omar is an Arab Australian poet who’s been published in contemporary Australian poetry best Australian poems 2016 strange horizons going down swinging overland me engine and others and he was awarded the runner-up prize in this year’s Judith write poetry prize his debut collection these wild houses is coming from cordite in 2017 elizabeth is a writer from perth western australia and a sessional academic at Curtin University her debut novel rubik is due for release in 2017 with Rio which I’m publishing and I’m delighted to be publishing Thank You Alice into each of you we’re going to start since this is a digital writers festival and the festival would like me to generally acknowledged First Nations people but I thought we could also each talk about the lands that we’re on since each of us is in a different place most of us are in different places so I’m on gadigal and I’m in Sydney so they’re gadigal people of the eora nation and I’d like to pay my respects to them and to the elders and their continued custodianship of this land Elizabeth we’re about to you so I would like to acknowledge the logic people who are additional custodians of this land from which I’m joining this meeting and I mall where are you sorry omal where are you now where are you which land are you on um I mean gray which is home to the woman and one warring tribes of the Kulin nation I’d like to thank respects to their elders past and present and to any elders or their descendants who are watching on their sovereign lands thank you Oh Caitlin where are you ah same as you in sydney on gadigal land so I’d like to acknowledge again the elders past and present at the aura nation and all others watching on their traditional lands thank you all okay so now that we’ve placed ourselves and we’ve introduced ourselves I thought it’d be good for each of you to talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing and I’m a participating chair in this session so I’ll be contributing a little bit too so Caitlin how about we start with you can you tell me a bit about your practice and how editing figures into it huh and well I’m a poet so i right pretty much every day and I think editing is useful to me as getting information both from other writers on how they write eating that into my practice but also allowing me to contribute to your community so I like to send out really really really rough draft and get feedback on that pretty much immediately like I’m not precious about my work so I think with Omar I’ll often send him thing to be like this is really sure or this is really weird is there anything here and you’ll be able to tell me if there’s anything there if i should just pretty much dump it that’s yeah it tends to be working for me okay so i might how about you um yeah like I Caitlin um i right fairly Austin I wouldn’t say every day but I’m fairly prolific and anything is plays a big part is my work I am always editing poems I feel I’ve really ever like to settle um poems that I wrote three years ago I think I’m still editing now and reading aloud is is a big part of that process but also getting feedback from my contemporaries like Caitlin is also very important to me also I don’t think I’ve ever told her to dump a poem very good Elizabeth what about you um yeah I tend to have difficulty distinguishing between the acts of editing and writing because to me they both they both are the work and they both enable the work to come to fruition so I tend to write and self-edit simultaneously um and so for this reason I’m quite a slow writer and I tend to certain ideas for a long time before I commit them to the page and yeah it’s kind of important to me to be as precise as possible from the get-go especially with punctuation and sentence structure and things that will affect the readers understanding of my work in the rhythm and the melody of my work I guess and so in that sense I would like to try to be accountable to an audience from the get-go and I also i guess i find that once I commit words to the page it becomes harder to change them once they’re there like there’s only so many changes i can do before the words kind of become set in my mind so um yeah it’s important to me to like bri downwards and edit them as i as i write and yeah I’m hot and I’m like Omar and Caitlin have said like seeking feedback from others is important to me too and that helped me figure out whether my intentions are coming across and also it can help me clarify my intentions if my readers can spot things that I haven’t spotted um yes I don’t write very often partly because when I became an editor I found it nearly impossible to do I know some people manage to do both but for me being an editor is my day job means that I basically can’t write but I wrote a piece recently occasionally I write essays or nonfiction pieces and I have the exact opposite process to you Elizabeth I have to hammer it out and give this little conscious thought to it as possible because otherwise I just would never ever finish a draft because I’m just way too self-conscious and self-critical and can’t even get a sentence down without despising it so speed is key for me and revisions really important but I’m interested in this idea of beta readers as a kind of second editor so in a way the author or the writer is the first edit in revising their work and then the beta or the fighters and your work too and I’d be interested to know how you find beta readers and how you come to trust them just at this point like to say you can follow along with the hashtag DWF 16 at home and we’ll be throwing it open to you for questions at the end but back to the topic of beta readers Caitlin how did you find Omar as a beta reader and and how did that relationship develop it for tire uh we were in the same kind of workshop that the lovely Judy beverage was running with some of her past and present students at University of Sydney I thought I don’t really know we were Facebook friends and we write to each other about poems and then at some point oma’s quite like he’d be like I forget we email palms to the overall class group and at some point maybe you took one that i emailed and was like I fixed it for you you’re crazy but I’m fit I’m I don’t have a problem with I guess I’m lucky trusting beta readers like I’m quite happy once the palms down to just be like hey whatever you want to do and that’s the same with o mo anyone else that reads my work any editors I send it to if they come back with I’d like you to change these things I’m lecture whatevs like I’ll have final say on how it goes into my actual collection finally but like I’m always interested in what people have to say and after the initial thing we just started emailing back and forth I guess maybe like once a week poems yeah yeah yeah Oh mom would you like to correct the record or did you actually say um look I think I think she may have been right but my defense in my defense I guess I’m only ever moved to AH send and edit through to someone when the work is really good and like I really like it but I feel like it’s just you know I mean like it has to be compelling enough to warrant me actually putting myself out there and saying I think this might be a little bit you know look at this this is a suggestion obviously but yeah I don’t know if I use the words fixed to god I hope but yeah I think that’s that’s kind of generally how how it started and it’s it’s been great because with other poets that I that I know that I used to meld workshop thing going they weren’t as prolific as me and I would always feel bad because I felt like I was sending like a lot more work out than I was receiving so that the balance was not quite skewed well was was a bit skewed but um with Caitlyn’s as we both ride fairly often it doesn’t feel that way and we can just bounce off of each other and I also feel like we have a very similar in a way in our fixations and the things that we write about and the poems that we like um so yeah we’re we’re a good fit as far as the the writing and the editing is concerned hmm Elizabeth do you have many in a way of beta readers and can you talk a little bit about the way working on a creative work as part of a PhD involves a different kind of feature reading yeah um so basically there are there are two people in my life who I could generally always rely on to read my drawers and I’ve met them both at Curtin one we’re all an undergrad together um the first of Aaron Pierce who’s probably best known for her contribution to the Fremantle press anthology the kid on the karaoke stage and the second is ever be offered who also is one of my colleagues at Curtin and she was most recently published i think in the engine and ever and I both did a PhD simultaneously so I kind of have a reciprocal I guess feedback kind of relationship with ever an errand and I’m broth kind of familiar with each other’s work and sometimes we write in the same space and yeah it’s um I feel really blessed to get to have found my people like through uni and and especially because I’m workshopping and cut and in you know undergraduate units was so key um and so when I sent work to Erin or ever and I get it back um they yeah they’ll just bring so much in it and I find that really helpful when it comes to like revisiting and then re-editing but yeah well while doing the PhD um I while my supervisor Deborah honey would read like Western my address um I would send them to her like ahead of time and then we meet up and then she’d sort of make notes and tell me what she thought and um I found that I was very bad at kind of responding face-to-face in the moment to her to her thoughts and I’ll kind of scuttle away to a dark corner and um revisit them my drafts and um yeah then come back with the with a new draft kind of thing so um and I guess that’s kind of stayed with me like um when we work we work together Alice and how are your emails you always like you give me a call if you want to discuss these changes but I don’t know if I could actually do you that like um yeah I don’t know how I could have a conversation about about yeah about changing work because I need to it’s so it’s so interior for me I need to UM be in my safe space of blankets and stuff yeah I’m not sure if that answers that speaks to your question as precisely as you wanted but ya know that answers my question um the it’s I mean editing your work elizabeth is it makes me feel a little bit slack i have to say because i don’t have to do terribly much and especially in the case of the book because it had already been part of your the creative component of your PhD is in some cases creative components of PhDs need a lot of work before they’re the kind of thing that’s ready to be published there’s a book because often there are different intentions behind books that are sold in the world and books that are written as in the case of Rubik there was not really that much in editing and in the Lola story that we have up on the digital writers festival when we were deciding which story to use for the project Elizabeth you sent me through two stories and one of them I just thought there’s no way we can use this for the project because it was just effectively done I had maybe a couple of things that I could have suggested to do with very very very minor word substitutions or maybe a slight tweak to punctuation but it was so precise and so well-written and you know the humor was bang on and I just thought we can’t put this up because then people will say what the hell it is doing they don’t fit himself it’s a good thing so we chose the other story because at least I thought that I had something to contribute to that one and I think that something is an editor you have to know where your and there are times that I don’t think that I’m the best person to respond to something or I’m best place when it comes to rejecting submissions whether it’s for seizure the livery journal that i had it or if it’s book projects sometimes I’m rejecting something because I don’t think I’m the right advocate for that work or I don’t think that I know how to develop the work in order to get it to be its best self so I think sometimes maybe people think that’s just a line that that an editor might spin but I think it’s a legitimate reason and I guess something I wanted to talk a little bit about is the education of editors and whether you feel as though when you’re working on something for publication if you feel as though you need to educate the editor and specific things for instance i was talking to an aboriginal right and not long ago who wanted to include words in language in the story and the editor said that they wanted to have translations and the writer said I want the words as is i don’t want translations so it was a negotiation process of trying to have in fact the writer educating the editor in that case and explaining why they didn’t want to have the translations in that way so I was wondering if any of you would like to talk about educating editors and and how that works and sort of pushing back oh hi MA yeah yeah look I i don’t know if i would use the word educating but i do think it’s important to push back um me i’m a fairly let’s say that’s the UH hands-on editor um and the reason for that is I not because I demand that what I like be reflected in the work but because in pushing I want the rider to push back I specifically want them they this cannot change as soon as soon as that happens as soon as I know what’s essential to them in the poem then I feel I can do a better job emphasizing that or making it clearer and so I I have done that as as a writer with editors when I’m when I ask for things to change in a poem that um reference my Arabic heritage for example will reference where I grew up or you know things that they might think are meaningless but actually have heavy meaning um for whatever reason and then back but I don’t but I think that’s a necessary part of the process I think something can be gained in the the push in the poll I think too and that comes back to the question of trust as well having a trusted relationship with an editor makes all the difference because it means that you’re happy to contradict them and they to contradict you and then you can have it out rather than and overly polite and sweeping it under the carpet Elizabeth how have have you felt in terms of editor I mean you’ve been published in a few literary journals and so you’ve worked with a few different editors in a sort of one-on-one story basis how does that work for you um well I think like Caitlin I tend not to be super precious about about my work I think you know in in a really big way work shopping at university has helped has come prepared me for editor relationships because I think it’s through the cumulative experiences of work shopping that I’ve managed to hold an instinct for when to stick to my guns or went to yield to an edge there’s expertise um but I like with your um your edit on leather and Calliope um like I find that kind of edit like quite typical for a story of that length and that um and I mean it’s not particularly complex stories so like um yeah I kind of am kind of I guess you used to that level of yes i’m wearing my expressions and not really requesting too many structural changes because I’ve kind of already put a lot of work and self editing in like a better reading especially with Aaron and ever so um I’m not sure if that speaks to your question but um yeah I um I think I’m going to think back I’m sorry it one of the things in your work is there are a lot of cultural references pop culture references but also to different kinds of things particularly in rubic so some of the stories have appeared for instance in overland and elsewhere do you ever feel as though you have to educate editors on where the references are coming from and how they’re functioning um not really not more than i would like a like a beta reader i guess like it oh I find that helpful information actually when when someone doesn’t understand a reference it it helps me to I guess communicate better yeah I think of ways to a signal signal what a cultural reference is so that it could be a bread base of someone who’s not initiated um but yeah um and sorry keep going um no I had nothing sorry that’s right Caitlin do how has it been for you do you feel as though you do build understanding with editors for work and the push in the pool how is that played out for you um it’s actually been really interesting because working with my primary editor on actually pulling together my collection so the downside about being prolific and not precious is that I am NOT like Elizabeth and very I’m not precise and so ah yeah my aunt was always like your punctuation is inconsistent and almost sometimes like that is always like why is there not this thing here and I’ll be like I don’t know I didn’t and my editing Latner you need to think about grammar and how you’re using grammar and what it actually means to you because you’re a poet and you need to have like feelings about this and I was like okay good so then I had to foster our teacher let those things that’s actually something I overall like about their editing relationship and I think there’s something I go back to i forget what Palmer was of romance but we there’s one where I was just like know that you need to cut all this out cuz here’s the heat and like I want that just this heat bit and you’re arguing for like it’s like the long lines and the dilatory affected like a push-pull in a poem and I’m like no I want it to just essentially be like a sledgehammer and like different priorities that you can have in a piece of work and like I find that so interesting to actually learn that through editing some of these work how they approach that type of thing in poetry it’s cool yeah and in poetry in particular in some ways the focus is so much are things like punctuation and word choice it is your grandma that’s something that has that’s based on instinct and and gut feeling or is it something that you feel that you’ve learned over time or you’ve been influenced by particular writers I would just be gut feeling an instinct and laziness for me no it’s just trying to standardize it and be as simple as possible and go through and think about is this readable so I guess I do have to think about how i was using grammar and how accessible i was making my work and actually think about the reader which i guess is something you should do otherwise oh my where does your sense of language and grammar and the sort of wordplay come from is it is it mostly instinct or is it something that you have shifted over time um yeah I would say it’s mostly instinct I don’t think about it too much I don’t know before a poem begins whether my register will be high or whether it will be low I don’t know if I’m gonna be writing a poem in the kindest lane that I heard growing up or that is still you by my cousins for example or if I’m gonna you know essentially sound on the page like an old white man i don’t i don’t actually know um if it happens on the page and afterward I I look at it and I go doesn’t need to add do I need to play do I need to shift between these two um you know what’s what’s going on here and then how can I make it other piece make it all sting together but but yeah it’s it’s certainly not a calculated choice beforehand and how did the work shopping in an academic context play into that process do you think it it had an effect on the way that you work or we or was it something that was introduced and then you needed to shut out as well um how did the academic process affected am I right in thinking that you studied poetry with some GD beverage is that right yes I did but I don’t mmm I didn’t really take too much away from that in terms of uh my own writing if that makes any site that that’s not what I want to say it’s like I feel like I i came into poetry via um spoken word and and slam I feel like seeing that and hearing that accessible for me and I needed to come in that way yeah the academic or formal elements of poetry that I was introduced to came later and didn’t really shape my work as as as much I feel um but it certainly did have an impact but i don’t know i mean it’s still relatively recent for me so i’m not really sure about how to measure that I mean talking about things like register that’s different from slam because we’ve slam poetry it would it’s more likely it would be in one register whereas you’re saying that your written poetry it may be high it may be low depending on the content and the context of the poem is that did I understand that right yes you understood that right but I think there’s a there’s a difference between slam and spoken word um in in that word poetry can be more than the the slam formic in tell a story with words it can in fact shift registers it can do more than just be the kind of self aggrandizing option associated with slam I think that there are storytellers and spoke was um like Luca lesson for example and like I’m Kate and tempers and uh Anna Smosh Ghani and people like this who play with the de formas end I’ve I learned as much from them as I did it from Philip Levine for example good um Elizabeth from what you were saying before it sounded as though things like grammar play a part in your process from the beginning can you talk about how it came into your consciousness I suppose and and how it plays out in your writing I guess I care a great deal about being precise with punctuation and grammar and sentence structure and stuff and not for the sake of correctness but for the sake of clarity and it’s again that kind of trying to be accountable to an audience from the get-go um because I mean when I’m when I’m writing I mean it’s an act of communication and I want to be understood and I guess um yeah for me it’s it’s part of the act of being or being a writer to think about how my words are being received and trying to make it as easy as possible for the reader to understand um yeah I understand my work I guess yeah but ease of understanding is not the only thing at play mm that’s sort of things like playing with sentence structure or it’s almost like a cinematographer and camera angles you can use grammar and and the way that you structure your sentences to to shift the readers experience that’s true yeah um oh yeah no I agree with you yeah like it’s hot um-hmm so it’s like as as well as some making sure that the reading experience is clear for the reader i guess it’s also about um I guess being being loyal or authentic to my own voices well I guess and um yeah so it’s a kind of its yeah it’s both those things I guess and um and like I guess ensuring rhythmically that my work is coming across the way that I change i guess i’m not sure if that make sense yeah that makes sense I mean I always knew features from Alice I should have a stamp that I can just roll up your um what my last question before I opened it up to viewers if he famous question before i do that is about technology and it’s a fairly sort of practical question and the drafting process and things like track changes or using comment in PDF or i’m particularly interested for the poet’s do you draft on paper and then transfer it to your computer are you computer from the beginning Caitlin how how does what kind of technology do you use and how do you use it oh I’m paper first and then type up and then if I’m editing that’s when i’ll use the computer in general though um so with omar tends to be electronic editing but with my actual like my manuscript editor they would print out my draft and do all of their changes in pencil on it of the entire manuscript and then hand me back physically the manuscript with all the pencil suggested changes as opposed to a word document so that was always interesting but um now I like track changes and I especially for palms cuz then you can just mess with the actual layer which is so important to a poem in its editing as well like the outer shift up the lineation that like that’s where technology comes in to me it’s interesting I’ve talked to some poetry editors who are very unhappy with the advent of word processing because it means that when you come to types at a book the standard size for poetry books is based on the idea of people writing in notebooks effectively but with a or pages it just doesn’t fit three so you have to with the typesetter to try and make it make sense and i know some poets who actually set up their files in their computer so that it’s a five size so that they can actually have a sense of how it will look on the printed page before it goes to the editor so that’s an option if you want it look good it depends and you know for some poems it’s more it’s more crucial and for others it’s less crucial whether they’re around on lines or not but omari your pen and paper kind of guy sometimes um sometimes I right well not sometimes most times i right arm onward my laptop and sometimes I write with pen and paper there is a marked difference with poems that I start on the page but in saying that I just do whatever feels right in the moment um I think riding on the page with them and or pencil is really useful it’s like you can get an easy second draft when up what are the computer you just edit out the bits you don’t need so it’s a useful shortcut as well but but I yeah I track changes I with Kent and at core tight on we just exchanged edits on the manuscript using the PDF and comment on it which was kind of frustrating as as a process but works as well so yeah and when you’re editing Caitlyn’s work do you always do it on screen or do have a printed out in scribble I never printed out um but that’s mostly because I don’t have a printer I did maybe maybe but look Caitlin is a great poet so it doesn’t it really doesn’t require much um for me it’s just sort of like I can see it fairly immediately um whether there’s something that’s just slightly um out of line or just slightly unnecessary and then I can go yeah here’s what I think um I will actually print out all of Omar’s poems most of the time and then write on them and then have to type up my changes apartment naturally on writers festival when I wrote dad you hard with like five of his palms with lack pencil written notes on the middle like here go ahead he was like I cannot understand anything that you have been high that is good yes I I think increasingly as people don’t have printers at their houses anymore we’ll we’ll all just end up doing it digitally do you when you’re drafting do you print things out and scribble on them or are you mostly digital me oh sorry Elizabeth Oh me sorry um I’m mostly digital I guess I um I like to write on my laptop in bed and but I guess sometimes when I want to I guess d familiarize myself a little bit I will um Grady Union print it out and make marks on the page um yeah I kind of yeah sometimes it’s good to switch it off I guess yeah yeah sorry I was just going to say when I’m editing I like to do at least one version of each normally most of the work will be done in on screen and generally i mean it’s it’s partly because I I feel as though it’s a waste of trees printing stuff out over and over again but there’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be when I worked primarily on Illustrated titles to everything out of this huge color a three shoots and then somebody would steal something from the printer and you’d lose pages and you’d have to reprint it and it was just before treason I killed but I feel very good you do see different things depending on whether you’re reading on screen or on the page and it’s one of my favorite moments is sending pages to an author after it’s been typeset because it really does change the way that it looks or even more fun Elizabeth that you can tell me what you think but when we do reading copies of a book and it suddenly looks like a actual physical book for the first yeah yeah um I’m actually reading for my reading copy of Rubik at the moment and I’ve like got queries to slice into you at a later date but yeah definitely you do spot different things from them yeah when it’s on the printed page Jim when it’s typeset yeah yeah well and specifically in that book because there are different stories that are types at inside the different ways then they have to be these negotiations and that happens all the time with poetry there was i when i was at jerome ando we published a book by Kate Middleton and she had created a certain punctuation mark which was six spaces and she could tell it by eye because she she’d done it so carefully and there are a few occasions where I sneakily had deleted one or two spaces to try and fit something on a line to avoid a run online and she could tell just by looking at it and I had cheated so i had to find other solutions to not do away with her unique six space punctuation while really an but that’s that’s the kind of that’s the kind of fun that you have with poetry that you have to you have to be flexible and and come up with different solutions because it’s a it’s a different kind of process and punctuation could offer mean different things so i think that it’s a little bit quiet on the interwebs and we don’t have any questions yeah um we were talking about editing on the micro level but something that I wonder about often is editing on the macro level as in how do you decide what to include in a manuscript this is just me I’m literally just wondering what you guys think about especially in negotiating with it with an editor as to what to include in it in its shape in its in its overall structure do you think about that does it not matter ah oh well I can just respond on a couple of fronts in in one sense there’s a practical question of how many pages of book has and even though print costs have come to thumb extinct has an impact on price but it also there are certain conventions if they set for poetry because there are convention about how long a poetry book is so as arbitrary as that may sound one of the considerations is length but I think also things like urban flow and the overall structure and also what the books trying to achieve so for instance if it’s a very political collection it may benefit from having some poems that aren’t as political to interrupt the flow or to add a shift in tone or something like that so that might be a case for increasing the number of poems in it in my collection or vice versa if you want it to be much more strictly and to fit a certain genre or a certain goal more tidally then you might take out those things I don’t feel as though for every single book or two it’s a negotiation and a process that has to be made between the writer and the editor Oh Caitlin you’re going through this at them limit what do you think um well I’ve just been through it for me it’s actually really like a lot about tired and what overall tone I want the book to set so often I’ll be like is this too dark like is there need for more light in this and that’s often where like you’re talking about inserting West political poems into a political collection I will think about like what is missing from the wired pinnochlio human experience that can be captured by poetry that I can that I can put into this and then it’s about again this is actually where I do you think about the reader like what is the reading experience that I want my reader to get from this overall hook in terms of ordering them um and then there will be a few poems that I’ll go to the mat for someone wants to pull out and then other ones my worst fear is that i will have submitted a manuscript and then realize that i hate one of the poems a lot and then my owners will be like no that’s the poem we need to have in there I’ll be like no no that’s a terrible problem take it out as in it forever but that hasn’t happened so much yet but I would I think I would just that would be where like okay no I’m not having a book anymore because there’s terrible if you talk to graphic designers it’s a common experience where they might intentionally put a dud in a set of designs that are sent to an author or whoever to try and encourage them to go towards their favorite design but this is a very dangerous part of because precisely what you’re saying could happen and the author might say I love that one and then you then you have to have a big fight about why it’s a terrible cover even though you sent it to them okay so yes buyer beware on that one Elizabeth in terms of selecting your book is both a novel and a collection of short stories in a way and can you talk about inclusion and exclusion um well um i guess like going back to earlier in our conversation we’re talking about trust and stuff I guess um I guess well I mean for this is my first collection that I’ve um that I’m having published so um I don’t have much else to refer to but I guess when when we were talking about removing possibly removing two of the stories um I I guess because I trusted your opinion Ellis like guy um I yeah and it felt more it’s like you said like it’s more of a negotiation or a conversation um rather than I you must cut all this and um so I guess because i felt like i was able to have my say like I was a bit I was not so precious about if though if those two stories like we’re not collection anymore I could just kind of say here’s what I think here’s what why these stories are significant to me and I could yeah just be open to like yeah just yeah hearing what you thought in response to my response I guess yeah I would you like to answer your own question haha I don’t really I don’t have I don’t have an answer it’s just something that that’s in on my mind as I’m heading toward putting a second collection together how much of a theme do I want really uh how much variety as the things are just there they’re on my mind um my first collection I think can’t wanted a couple that I had in the bank script out wound I didn’t any a good reasons for and I accepted the reasons my mostly like I think you’re doubling up on this this sentiment that this poem feels unnecessary um you know basically you’ve already done and so why why do it again and that kind of thing just just tighten it up that vanity tends to me um yeah I was just thinking in general I think it’s expected of a poetry collection that it had a running theme that it builds to something I don’t know if this is always business face but you know I kind of like the idea of also just having a set of poems as widen as varied in their strange and as the collective as you want them to be without needing to have some kind of narrative structure attached to it right like I just how possible that is or even how regular today hmm yeah i mean i feel as though there’s possibility particularly in poetry collections because you have the option of chat box which can be more specific or refined or or focused in terms of their scope and then a book can be more wide-ranging I definitely think it’s possible to have a collection that’s not explicitly themed but it’s always that difficulty when it comes to things like reviews and prices which poetry is still very much engaged with even if it’s a sort of fraught relationship but in order to do well in reviews and in prizes I think it’s easier both for judges and for reviewers to have those little hooks that they can that they can attach to and then it makes it easier to describe and to argue poor or ingest or yeah so and you know novels are a slightly or nonfiction whether it’s an essay collection or whether it’s narrative nonfiction the idea of inclusion and exclusion is obviously very important for them as well and anytime that you’re doing a major structural edit on a longer piece of work it’s a similar negotiation with the author about what stays in what comes out questions of repetition and rhythm and the overall structure so yeah it’s the same conversation even though the forms are quite different so I think while I’m hedging and and say saying things that are probably payton Leigh self-evident it might be time to wide up the conversation but I’d like to say thank you to all three of the participants for talking about editing and for letting us see a little bit behind the curtain and the process and their ideas and you’ll be able to find links to their work on the digital writers festival website so thank you to Kaitlyn to Omar and to Elizabeth and I hope you guys enjoyed watching thank you thank you