Editor finds expression through translation
Coffee House Press Editor Lizzie Davis finds her groove in subsidiary work and author support.
By Rachel Blood
Nebraska native Lizzie Davis finds a creative outlet in Minnesota-based editing and translation. As an editor for Coffee House Press, she works to translate novels from Spanish to English while striving to maintain the author’s voice. From content to line editing, Davis provides assistance to authors throughout the entire publication process to make sure their literature is the best that it can be.
Editorial responsibilities don’t stop at correcting grammar. Davis works to sell subsidiary rights: audio, film and translation. She gets fulfillment and joy from experimental fiction.
Q: What are your responsibilities as an editor?
A: [My] primary responsibility is to work with our editorial director to evaluate submissions and determine which are a good fit for the press, and then see the project along from contracting through production to publication.
I’m more focused on line editing and developmental editing. Developmental editing is the big picture. Line editing becomes a little bit more based on honing the sentences, and then copy editing and proofreading are more narrow still.
I work on one thing that, before I started this job, I didn’t know about. I work on selling the subsidiary rights to our books: translation rights or audio rights or film rights. I get to pitch those to people or publishers in other countries. A lot of our books get sold into translation in other countries; some of them have been translated into 17 languages. That’s just really rewarding work.
Q: What’s your favorite part of the publishing process?
A: I love the feeling of reading something and knowing that I want us to publish it. I feel really lucky to work at a nonprofit publisher because we can be a little bit more flexible with what we publish. We don’t have to be only publishing books that we think will sell a million copies. I wish all our books sold a million copies, but it’s nice to not be bound to that kind of commercial viability. It’s really fun to be reading something and to be like, “Wow, this person is doing something so surprising and so unusual, and I want to give this really strange book a home.” Just supporting the authors is fun.
Q: How long have you been at Coffee House Press and how did you get there?
A: I’ve been there for six years. I started as an intern, and there happened to be a job opening right around the time that my internship was supposed to end, so I applied for it. I’ve been there ever since. It was an exciting time to come on because we had just started publishing translations, and I’m a translator also, so it was exactly what I wanted to be.
It was crazy good luck, right out of college. I went to Brown. I started off doing a music degree in Denver, actually, and then I was in Scotland for a while randomly and then ended up doing literary arts and translation at Brown. It was really an odd trajectory. I’m from Nebraska. I never thought that I would be in Minnesota, but it’s such a good state for books, and for art in general, so I’m really glad to have learned that.
Q: What is your favorite book that you’ve worked on?
A: Recently, I got to work on this incredibly bizarre book that I like to describe as Lord of the Flies, but the setting is in an all-girl Catholic school in Ecuador. It’s super dark, but so amazing. The writer, Mónica Ojeda, is Ecuadorian, and it’s [about] these girls challenging each other to increasingly terrifying games after school. The language is just incredible. [The girls] start writing horror stories. One of them is kidnapped by her English teacher. It’s just a wild, wild book, and that’s always what I mean– not all the books we publish have to be that crazy, but I’m always looking for that feeling of, “Wow, this writer just did that. That’s crazy.” It’s called Jawbone.
Q: What languages do you translate?
A: Spanish. I also spent a year recently in Galicia and tried to learn Gallego, which is like a cross between Spanish and Portuguese. I would love to start translating from that language because it’s very infrequently translated.
Q: What is the biggest challenge of being an editor?
A: Lately, I’ve been thinking about how it’s really hard to determine when a book has been successful because we’re not a commercial publisher. It’s not like we can [say], “This book was successful because it sold 100,000 copies.” That’s fine, but sometimes I don’t know how to tell if a book is successful or not. How many reviews is enough reviews? How many sales is enough sales? How many events? How many great blurbs or prizes? It’s hard to get a sense of when what you’re doing is working. Sometimes you think that you’re publishing a book that is going to sell really well or get a lot of coverage, and then it doesn’t, and it’s never clear why, so it can be kind of mystifying at times.
I think the other thing that kind of ties into that is that authors are always wanting their book to be reviewed in The New York Times or on the bestseller lists, and that doesn’t always happen. Managing their expectations and then dealing with their disappointment can be difficult, but I sympathize with them. Obviously, I want the best for our books, too. Being a nonprofit publisher, it’s just hard to ever feel like you’re getting ahead. It can be tiring. There’s a lot of turnover in publishing because people get burnt out.
Q: Do you do any writing of your own?
A: Yes. I used to do a lot of poetry writing. Lately, I’ve been traveling, and every time I’m not working, I’m usually translating, so it’s hard to write. I feel like I can only do two of those things, but I would like to do more. I think that’s kind of also a classic person in publishing answer, “Well, I used to write!” There are people I know here in the Twin Cities and not in the Twin Cities, too, who have managed to be really successful in publishing and also really successful with their own writing, so don’t let that scare you.
Q: Tell me about your recent translation residency.
A: It’s called Art Omi. You take all kinds of artists and writers and musicians and dancers and translators, and then you just go and basically have time to work on a project. This one was really relaxed. It was just eight other women, and the only thing that was mandatory was going to dinner every night. One of them was studying cartography as writing, and one of them was studying translating poems into dance. It was just really cool. I was just there to translate, which was less exciting than what they were doing. I think it’s a way of trying to keep my pursuits outside of publishing alive — to go do a residency like that, and to carve out time for it, or be in conversation with people who are doing creative work. It makes me feel a little bit closer to that part of my brain, which I have forsaken in order to publish the books of others.
Q: What advice would you give an aspiring editor?
A: Being in a place like Minneapolis or St. Paul is great because you have access to a lot of different publishers and a lot of different writers and events. I think by going and being a presence, whether it’s by attending events or volunteer reading for press or interning, people will start to get to know you. I’ve had some friends move here who didn’t have book publishing experience, but they just kind of did that. One of them worked at a bookstore and then started coordinating events, and eventually she got a job at a publishing house. Being active and making connections with people can really pay off.
I would say also: don’t feel like you have to read what everyone else is reading. I remind myself of that a lot because I feel like it can sometimes be a strength to just follow your own interests as a reader. If everyone’s reading the same 10 books, then everyone’s going to be publishing the same 10 books, so I think it’s great to follow your whims. You might have to apply to a lot of jobs, but that’s okay. Also, you don’t have to be an English major to get a job in book publishing. Sometimes, we’re especially interested in hiring people who have other perspectives to bring in some way.
If there’s anything Davis has learned from her time in the publishing industry, it’s that there are no limits. People of all backgrounds with all experience levels who share a love of literature can come together to produce impactful, passionate artwork, and Minnesota is the best place to do it. Davis will continue producing creative English work from Spanish texts, hoping to translate from Gallego in the future.
