Q&A: Editor in Life, Seth Prince

It’s a hot September day in Oklahoma, roughly 11 in the afternoon and Seth Prince is drinking coffee while rocking a windbreaker with an Oregonian insignia. The combination is out of place if you know Oklahoma weather, but so is Prince in some ways. After 14 years working as an editor in Oregon, this Oklahoma boy is back home, teaching at the University of Oklahoma, and still editing — every detail of his life.

Meghan Barton: Do all roads lead to Oklahoma?

Seth Prince: I don’t know about that. There is a, I sort of laugh, Amy will never leave this state again for a move, but you know, when we retire or something, it would be cool to go live on the Oregon coast or something. This is home, it’s always going to be home, but there’s a piece of me that after all these years in the northwest, there’s a good part of me that still, that still feels like a home too.

MB: From what I take from you, you just seem like Pacific Northwest was your niche.

SP: …Life changes, your perspective changes, and having three kids certainly changes you. So being able to come back and have our kids grow up around grand parents and aunts and uncles and cousins became very, very valuable. And Portland for all of its wonderful things, ever watch the show Portlandia? I mean it’s kind of true. There’s some stuff about Portland when you’re…Portland, I love Portland, I’ll always love Portland, but there is a, I think the word a lot of people associate to it, is there is a certain preciousness to it, every thing is just so.

MB: Why three kids?

SP: To get to a girl. (Laughs)

MB: Was that Amy?

SP: Uh huh, yeah I was down with it, but I was like, if it’s a third boy, that’s it, that’s all we’re getting, I have two siblings, she has one, primarily it was driven by the age gaps, my siblings are three years younger, and then 10 years younger, her sibling is four years older, and she always felt like the four year older gap was just enough that they didn’t, you know, it was always like oh it’s the little sister that’s just tagging along and being annoying, and so we were very deliberate, we had our oldest, and then two years later had the second because we wanted that more close gap so hopefully they’re a little more buddies, its not so much like oh you’re in the way all the time, although that is inevitably going to happen.

MB: Being the type A person that you are, and going from not getting home for dinner and having all of this to do, to Oklahoma, much more mundane. Do you go out of your mind?

SP: To me it’s kind of goofy, but like that component of editing, I like to try to take stuff that is at this level and take it to that level, and I think you can do that with stories, I think you can do that with a house, I think you can do that with a bike, I think you can do it like one of the jobs I had in high school was I worked at a car wash, and that led to some job where I detailed cars, this is stupid but I really love the idea of this beater car would come in that looked like crap and you know, you could work on it for three hours and you’d be like, wow it actually looks decent, and you know like a house, you can be like well I bought it and it looked like this and I worked on it and I can sell it for whatever, the investment of time to make something better is something I really enjoy, so on the weekends its really hard for me to sit there and do nothing.

MB: You’re an editor, you want to edit, even the spacing of your kids. Is Amy the same way, type A like you?

SP: No. She’s a kind of fly by the seed of her pants person, and it’s really good because I’m really introverted, she’s incredibly extroverted, so together I think we kind of balance each other out nicely.

MB: You met Amy here; did you take her to Oregon with you?

SP: She was a year behind me and yes, we got engaged the first year I was there, her senior year here, and then she ended up with an internship at the same newsroom.

MB: Is that ironic?

SP: Um I don’t know how it worked out, she was talented and got it on her own rights I’m sure.

MB: How does that happen, that’s kismet right?

SP: I don’t know, I think things just work out the way they need to work out.