Editing the Unknown
Lessons from working on a book I didn’t really understand (at first)
When I told people I was working on a photobook about an Ancient Mayan cacao ceremony, they almost invariably thought I’d said ‘cow ceremony’. As you can imagine, this conjured up all sorts of wild imaginings: temples, altars, probably some kind of sacrifice, what are they doing to that cow?
“Ca-cao,” I’d say. “Like chocolate.”
Oh, thank God.
I’d never heard of it before either, but then I’m not especially adventurous when it comes to spirituality. Which is not to say that I don’t care for it at all — if anything it just means that I’m hugely fascinated by what I don’t understand. So when we got the survey about what topics we’d be interested in covering for a photobook project, I put as big a tick as I digitally could next to ‘religion’ and hit the jackpot: a cacao ceremonialist. What even is that? What does it mean?
A quick Google search revealed it’s got something to do with drinking hot chocolate and talking about your feelings, but a weeks-long project revealed so much more. Audrey Love Bean trained for years in Guatemala to master the sacred tradition, finding not only a deep healing within herself but the tools to share it with others. Since her return to Melbourne she has been doing exactly that, hosting cacao ceremonies for friends and strangers alike to create what peace she can in an increasingly hectic world.
She’s now also the star of her very own book. One of the major assessments of RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program saw editing and photography students paired up to produce a photobook, bringing words and images together into a cohesive hardback narrative. Once the photographers had settled on their story and started assembling it, it was the editors’ job — our job — to be the fresh pair of eyes and guiding hands to, hopefully, make something really really good: a real live book. No pressure, right?
My photographer and collaborator, David, was a good friend of Audrey’s, having met her at — naturally — a chocolate shop where they both worked. But when it came to the intricacies of spirituality, he said that he was just as lost as I was. It’s interesting, we both agreed, but not our cup of hot chocolate. This, to me, presented the first problem of our project: how were we going to write sensitively about something neither of us fully understood? How could we do justice not just to Audrey’s story but to the culture and tradition it came from? How could we make this strange new world a place for everyone? The beauty of a real live book is that anyone can read it, or learn from it, and hopefully even love it; whatever story we were going to tell, I wanted everyone to share in some part of that experience. (Again, no pressure.) It’s hard enough work getting people to Look Beyond on a good day — where were we going to start with Ancient Mayan feel-good hot chocolate?
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry. As Audrey herself says, chocolate is already much more accessible than most spiritual conduits, but our book was doing pretty well on its own too. The first draft David showed me was perfectly written, navigating the ins and outs of Audrey’s craft with delicacy and feeling. A lot of it came direct from interviews and conversations with Audrey, talking about her experiences with a sincerity you couldn’t help but share; in her hands, the strange trinkets gathered at her home altar were suddenly full of meaning. And yet the dull reality most of us know was never too far away, with photos of crushed cacao beans and home ceremonies slipped in between rolls of bunting paper at the Victorian Greens’ office and long calls wrestling with Centrelink. The unfamiliar and unattainable somehow began to feel normal and accessible, even to a simpleton like me.
Once this groundwork was laid (and, of course, cleaned up a little here and there), my job suddenly became much more boring. What warrants a capital? What about italics? Are these scare quotes too much? How do you spell Tzutujil, or phenylethylamine for that matter? My questions grew into a style sheet and word list more sprawling than I could have imagined, covering everything from Lake Atitlan to Leonard Cohen. We decided to go with more max caps than is strictly traditional to fully communicate the importance of the cacao tradition, and despite my initial assumptions, the only foreign words we wound up italicising were the Latin ones. Little, boring things, but stories are just words and words are just symbols and those symbols have rules. David had pulled a great story together with some beautiful photos to match; all that was left to do now was fine-tune them for the best result.
I’m no guru, but I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two from this project. About Ancient Mayan cacao ceremony, yes — but also about trusting a writer to know their story and the importance of a careful eye when it comes to mapping the unknown. Mostly, though, I find myself once again amazed by the power of words, spoken and written, pulled together with a little sympathy and patience to create a new understanding you never imagined yourself having. Daunting? Yes. Exciting? Always.
