Editor Interview: Galileo Press

Backbeat Writing

Trio House, WTAW press, Black Lawrence, Sarabande, Zona Motel.

Truman Capote
Tommy Orange
Joe Brainard
Brittany Ackerman
Lucy K. Shaw
Maya Popa
Esperanza Snyder
Mark Wunderlich

We have a collage of experience with art and music and writing. For us, not all the angles are represented by the rhetoric and so we're able to see the author's rhetoric apart from her voice. Like just knowing a piano is a percussive instrument or how a double shuffle 'old train beat' moves someone away from devotion, praise, and gospel, toward Blues. For us, when reality is a work of art, all writing is ekphrastic, and like the half punk drummer says, 'there's no such thing as static.'

A great idea for a book is merely a great idea for a book. Perfect writing is merely perfect writing. Brilliant frames and scaffolding, and brilliant line edits and shaping, only open the door. You still have to walk through and bring the reader with you. And you must be willing to deal with your own haunt without making a fetish of it. The point of squinting at what we've published in the past is not only to learn what writers we like, but to learn something about our readers,
As for craft notes, our free substack provides enough. The most oft cited reasons are stylistic ones--showing us the volcano but not showing us the lava, having more frame than painting, locking the speaker into the center of every frame, using conditional language to swarm the reader. Using transition words when there is no actual transition, and using time markers for sequencing rather than time also tends to stumble the planet.
The most often ignored guideline is to write a brief artist statement, and too many authors confuse this with an elevator pitch or agent query letter. Don't be a salesman.

At some level, the decision to publish a manuscript reflects a relationship. It doesn't have to be a marriage and it doesn't have to be too excessive or dynamic. Still, it's a connection, and the submissions process needs to anticipate this connection. Needs to hope for it and expect it. Because we're all in this together.
Half of our declines are based on style. Half are based on line edits. There's only so much we can do for you to land you with us. But there's also a small percentage that is declined...It's good writing, and writing that is certainly good enough to publish, but the writer has held back, has at some point said 'oh fuck it that's good enough' and then moved on. Please don't move on. Not every good manuscript has a chance to become a good good manuscript so don't cheap out on your art.

We read cover letters. We tend not to be too stirred by writing that has been green lit by others, but it's nice to know that someone is 'in the business' either as an emerging, mid-career, or legacy author. Cover letters can be a place for your brief personal rhetoric to live so that it doesn't have to live inside your manuscript. If we've corresponded before, it can help to remind us of that. If you're sending a manuscript after reading one of our books, that can sometimes be a way to help us find our way into your writing.

Each year, at least two dozen times, we read the whole 300-400 page manuscript even if we know on page 3 it is not for us. That's because even if it's not right for us, it might still be a nice read, and we try to make this clear to the author and what we'd want changed. Generally, we read up to about a third of the manuscript that we decline, and even less if our differences with the writer are more obvious. I mean, we don't disguise how plant forward we are so please don't send us a box of meat.

My first cup of tea in the morning is for personal correspondence with other writers and check-ins with house authors. I read manuscripts until lunch with a short nap at 10:30, then do some errands or else switch my reading to what books I'm reading for pleasure (Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein, John Lingan, Tennessee Williams, John O'hara) or for book reviewing or essay writing (April Bernard, Matthew Bialer, Barbara Guest). A second short nap at three and then I'm back to submissions until the golden hour.

Editing ranges from multi-year life changing line edits to very few touches at all. From an editor's perspective, it is very difficult to promote a book and its author if the author regrets the outcome for the book itself or its cover. It also gets weird if we make a suggestion which the author declines and then a few years later they regret having passed on the suggestion.
What we love and what we like and what we're used to are three very different things. We'll share an opinion with the author, but we try to make it a humble share. If the author approves of none of our changes that's fine too. We'll still do the book but we won't always be comfortable talking about the book, or building a literary conversation around it.
Sometimes, a manuscript feels bigger than what we can provide. In this way, some of our line-edited manuscripts have won the National Poetry Series, various Juniper Prizes, and in one case a National Book Award after our encouragements. We also recruit literary agents for authors when we feel that is their best move. If a chapter or section seems to need editing we cannot provide, then we enroll the author in various online workshops (Conscious Writers Collective, Catapult, etc.) and literary conferences.

As many as we can find.

We are funded entirely through sales and small donations. We are not owned by an institution.