Generally, we readers hold the misconception that
editors are the people who let a misspelled word slip onto the pages or altered
a writer’s whatever to fit into limited space. Editors are the ones we blame
for just about anything that doesn’t look or read right within a book. And, to
a minor degree, we’re correct in that belief in regards to copy editors. What
we don’t see is what goes on behind the scenes and the invaluable, creative,
service editors, in all their varying forms, provide authors and readers.
Two of the best and most respected editors in the
business are Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. These women don’t just sit at
desks, painstakingly reviewing manuscripts for flaws or areas in need of
improvement, although that’s an important part of their job. Their love of
storytelling and keen sense of what readers want led them to create anthologies – collections of short stories – by some of the most
renowned authors we readers have come to enjoy: Stephen King, Peter Straub,
Susanna Clark, Neil Gaiman, and Angela Carter, to name a scant few. Datlow and
Windling’s work has amassed them a treasure trove of awards, not limited to
multiple Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, International Horror Guild
Awards, Hugo Awards…the list goes on and on.
Awards honor a singular event. Be it the Olympics
or an anthology of fairy tales, we spectators more than likely view the win as
pertaining to that one golden moment of crowning achievement. To the individual
receiving the award, that polished disk or framed certificate is the validation
of years of labor, sacrifice, sweat, and tears. Such is the case of the thirty
year journey of Datlow and Windling.
On the surface, these editors couldn’t be more
different. Ellen Datlow lives in a large U.S. city. Terri Windling, in a small village in the U.K. Datlow enjoys science fiction and horror –
Windling, fantasy and mythic fiction.
Datlow adores cats and collects dolls and doll parts – Windling adores dogs and
is a dedicated artist. Yet, their opposites have melded in order to create some
of the finest and most enduring fantasy and horror anthologies in the marketplace
today.
Snow White, Blood Red, the first
of their six volumes of fairy tale retellings, was at the forefront of the
modern revival of adult fairy tale literature. Datlow & Windling edited the
ground-breaking "Year's Best Fantasy & Horror" volumes together
for sixteen years, and Datlow’s recent “The
Best Horror of the Year Volume Four” contains some seriously scary stuff.
Windling’s The Wood Wife is a
Mythopoeic Award winning novel that combines her love of fantasy with her love
of the desert. The Green Man: Tales of
the Mythic Forest is the editors’ exploration of forest myth and symbolism,
and suggested reading for teens and adult alike. There are no boundaries to
Datlow and Windling’s creative endeavors.
Now, After:
Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia is being released by Hyperion
October 9th. From Amazon.com: “If the melt-down, flood, plague, the
third World War, new Ice Age, Rapture, alien invasion, clamp-down, meteor, or
something else entirely hit today, what would tomorrow look like? Some of the
biggest names in YA and adult literature answer that very question in this
short story anthology, each story exploring the lives of teen protagonists
raised in catastrophe's wake—whether set in the days after the change, or
decades far in the future.
There are some people who believe anthologies
aren’t as popular as they once were. Read one edited by Datlow and Windling and
you will find out just how wrong “some people” can be.
Q) The obvious
question: What caused the two of you to work together initially, and what
defining moment said this was a good idea that needed to continue?
A) Jim Frenkel created the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror series
(published by St. Martin's Press) and he hired the two of us to edit it -- with
Ellen handling the horror half of each volume and Terri, the fantasy half. Both
of us were living in New York back then, and we knew each other socially
through publishing circles, but we'd never worked together before. We liked the
experience so much that we then paired up to create the Snow White, Blood Red series...and twenty-five years later we're
still editorial partners, and good friends.
We find that the strength we have as
a team is that we both love fantastic literature, but we come at it from
opposite directions: Ellen from the dark fantasy and horror end of the
spectrum, Terri from the high fantasy and mythic fiction end, with our tastes
overlapping somewhere in the middle. This gives the books that we edit together
a broader range and diversity.
Q) Readers
have claimed of late that the focus on book editing seems to have diminished in
favor of quantity over quality. What is your take on that type of observation?
A) Are we talking about anthologies
here, or book editing in general? If we're focusing on anthologies, then yes,
we'd have to agree. These days it seems as if everyone thinks they can edit an
anthology—and well, yes, they can, but the important question is: can they edit
a good anthology? So many anthologies
published by micropresses are just thrown together by people who have no idea
what an editor does. (Ellen notes that this is particularly true in the horror
field, where it's something she encounters often when reading for the Best of the Year in Horror. ) With the
larger publishers, there's an unfortunate trend towards anthologies edited by
popular authors...and while that sometimes works (Holly Black's fine
anthologies, for example), more often these books are disjointed and
disappointing, because writing and editing are very different skills. Our fear
is that poorly edited books will turn readers off of short fiction altogether
-- which would be a shame.
Q) How do
you decide what the theme of any anthology will be, and how do the two of you
resolve disagreements in that decision?
A) We suggest themes to each other,
and then we run with any idea we both like...provided our agent thinks she can
sell it! If one of us has an idea that the other isn't keen on, then we always
have the option of doing the book by ourselves (we've each published solo
anthologies), so really there are no disputes to resolve.
Q) Keeping a finger on
the pulse of readers is a tricky business these days. What barometer do you use
to best guess the direction of readers’ interests?
A) We both read widely and stay
abreast of what's going on in the publishing industry. And sometimes our
literary agent, whose finger is very much on the pulse of the industry,
recommends a theme to us. Our last two anthologies, Teeth and After, were
based on themes she suggested.
Q) You work together,
and separately. What defines when you will work together?
A) Basically we work together on
books that we think will benefit from our diversity of tastes. For science
fiction, or pure horror, Ellen tends to work solo -- while Terri generally
works solo on projects that focus more on the purely fantastic end of the
spectrum.
Both Teeth (our YA vampire anthology) and After (our YA dystopian anthology) are unusual books for us because
their themes fall more naturally into Ellen's camp than Terri's. But because
these themes are so commercially popular, and thus a bit over-familiar to
readers, our aim was to do something fresh and original with the topics. We
felt we could do this best together, drawing on our different but complimentary
editorial backgrounds.
Q) How has the onset of
e-books altered what you do?
A) Like most of the publishing
industry, we're still figuring this out! The most immediate effect is a
positive one: we're able to make a number of our older, out-of-print
anthologies available again in e-book form, which gives them new life.
Q) Any parting comments
for your readers and those yet to become familiar with your work?
A) We create anthologies out of love
for the form, and writers write short stories out of love for the form --
nobody makes a lot of money this way, we all do it out of passion and
conviction. We create anthologies because we believe in short stories,
and we want to find ways to get them into readers' hands. Our ultimate aim is
to keep the market for fantastic short
fiction alive and thriving -- and every reader who buys anthologies, or
recommends them, or reviews them, is helping to keep it alive too. And this in
turn supports the creative evolution of writers both new and established.
"Nothing can break your heart like a good short
story," says short fiction writer Jason Ockert." Since there
isn’t a ton of time to make sense of a shorter narrative you can often trick
the heart into feeling something before the pesky brain goes to work
dissecting, dissecting, dissecting."
“Short
fiction seems more targeted [than novels]," says Paolo Bacigalupi (who
writes both), " hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they
hit, they explode, and you never forget them."
That's it in a nutshell.
DA Kentner can be reached at www.kevad.net
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