Are you my editor?

“The successful editor is one who is constantly finding new writers, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success. The thrill of developing fresh writing makes the search worthwhile, even when the waiting and working becomes months, sometimes years, of drudgery and frequent disappointment.”

— From Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg [AbeBooks]

After beginning his career in letters as a cub reporter at The New York Times, Maxwell Perkins moved to the publishing world where he became a literary editor at the house Charles Scribner’s Sons. There he made a name for himself, advocating for and working with writers like Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Under his editorial guardianship, Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises. Throughout their careers the two were loyal to Perkins and exchanged passionate letters with him about their writing and their lives, though Perkins himself was reserved about his own life.

Like Perkins, The Big Roundtable’s goal is to find new writers and to develop them: Push them to report deeper; challenge them to think about stories and why theirs needs an audience; and free them (to the best anyone can in a world of deadlines and limited time) to write without inhibition or fear.

For The Big Roundtable and its editors Perkins has been a great inspiration. Our two editors, Mike Hoyt (editor) and Cissi Falligant (senior editor), are of the same mind that a great editor helps to nurture writers and their stories from idea through publication.

Mike Hoyt spent 27 years at the Columbia Journalism Review, ten of them as its top editor. Before that he worked at two newspapers and wrote for several magazines. He’s an adjunct professor at Columbia’s J-school, a native of Kansas City, and a reasonably serene Mets fan.

Cissi Falligant has been an editor at the Chicago Tribune’s late and lamented experiment in suburban coverage, as well as at Crain Communications. She is at work on a book about dyslexia.

Submit your narrative nonfiction to The Big Roundtable for consideration, and you too might get the chance to work with these two lovely editors.

Originally published at thebigroundtable.tumblr.com.