Evelyn Somers Moves On: Observations and Advice from 30+ Years of Editorial Experience
by Audrey Dae Bush
Responses have been edited for readability.
Last fall was the Missouri Review’s last fall with Evelyn Somers. As associate editor since 1990, Evelyn has helped turn our journal’s offices into a powerhouse of literary excellence. I sat down with her back in September to hear her reflect on her career, and let me just say—it was the easiest interview ever. Evelyn is everything one could want in an editor: professional, precise, pertinent and passionate. Her time at TMR may be over, but her legacy of expertise lives on. Read on for invaluable insight into the editorial process at the Missouri Review, advice for those entering the literary publishing landscape, and a glimpse at what’s next for Evelyn.
Find us, plus a condensed audio/video version of this interview, on TikTok.
Audrey Dae Bush: Give us a rundown of your history with the magazine.
Evelyn Somers: I started as an intern on the Missouri Review staff in 1986 as a graduate student. I was in my second year of my master’s program in creative writing, and then I went on and stayed here at the University of Missouri and finished a PhD in literature. I was reading primarily fiction submissions at first, and at that point in time the internship at TMR was much smaller than it is now. There were just a few of us, and typically what would happen is students would stay for a couple of semesters and then rotate off the staff to make room for other students to join. We just simply didn’t have the volume of submissions that TMR has now, so there probably wasn’t enough for interns to do—all of this is in pre-Internet days, right? Pre-social media days. There simply wasn’t this level of involvement in the literary scene that journals have now.
So, it got to the point where I should have rotated off, and I didn’t want to, because I was just very committed. I loved the reading, I loved the work, I loved literature. For a while, nonfiction had generally been handled by faculty members in the English department, but that was changing, so I asked to stay and read nonfiction submissions instead. So I stayed on the staff and the internship began to grow, so there was more room, and I continued to work as a volunteer on the journal until about 1990, when I became associate editor. At that point, much of that work was still volunteer work, unpaid. There was some grant funding—I got a little money for it—but I was still teaching and working on my doctorate while I began to do more hands-on editing of manuscripts. It was something I had always been interested in and knew I had a knack for. And of course, as a writer, I was continually refining my own process. I’m obsessive about the quality of my own writing: I believe perfection is unlikely but not impossible. That all fed into my editorial work.
ADB: And then?
ES: I simply stayed on. There was a point where there was funding for a part-time position doing a combination of clerical things and manuscript reading, editing, etc. My job continued to evolve and center exclusively on editing as the magazine grew. There was more money for salaries and more need for a full-time person. I became a regular, officially full-time staff member in 1995. So there was a period of nine years where I was some of the time a student, some of the time a volunteer, sometimes a research assistant, and teaching on the side to make a living and support our growing family. It wasn’t much of a living in those days—we grew our own vegetables, and my husband hunted and fished a lot of our meat.
ADB: Describe your editorial process, from submission to publication.
ES: When you’re reading manuscripts, if you happen to read several manuscripts by the same author, you begin to take note. You may interact with them more than just by form rejection, and you might start making more comments on their work and be more encouraging. So you can have relationships with submitters even without accepting their work. One of the highlights of the job for me was seeing a name over and over and beginning to take an interest.
Then, once you’ve actually accepted the piece, you’re in a different relationship with the author—you’re in collaboration with them. You both have hopefully the same aim, which is to make the piece achieve its closest-to-ideal form for publication. That can at times involve not very much at all, and I think that’s an important thing for an editor to know: that this piece doesn’t need to be messed with too much, that it’s very close as it is and that the author has made all the right moves and it’s just a question of a light copy edit. Or it can involve something considerably more extensive in terms of suggestions for the author, questions about phrasing, questions about structure, and substantive cuts.
ADB: What are you looking for that makes a story really “work?”
ES: A lot of what makes either a story or an essay work is structural. And a lot of what makes it work is thematic. And the genuineness of the voice—there should be a sense of urgency that this story needs to be told in this particular way or that this subject needs to be explored in this voice, using this specific material and these narrative or rhetorical moves. Over the years, I’ve had different ways of expressing “what I’m looking for.” That said, “What are you looking for?” is not a question I love, because you’re never really looking for something specific. You’re just looking to see what’s there and then see if it’s good.
ADB: Do you have any examples of pieces that check these boxes, or any favorites?
ES: That’s a good question, and it’s a little bit hard, because you want writers to understand that as an editor, you’re not interested in playing favorites. There are stories and essays I fell in love with, but I wouldn’t want to say what they are, out of courtesy to all the authors whose work I also edited. I’ve certainly developed relationships with authors over the years, but I wouldn’t want anybody who ever submitted to TMR to feel like their work got less consideration than somebody else whom I have formed a relationship with. As for what I like—isn’t there something in a voice, a story that you yourself couldn’t tell, that you admire so much, that really just sticks with you in some sort of profound way? For me, some of those pieces were pure literary realism, which is something I can’t do well myself, so when I see it and it’s good, especially if it’s emotionally honest, I’m in awe. My own work veers toward the comic and the slightly speculative. I can’t do the straight treatment.
ADB: What’s a misconception that writers or those new to the field have about literary editing and publishing?
ES: What many writers don’t understand is that editors are genuinely rooting for them. When they’re sending things out into the world, there’s a fear that, number one, they might be ignored, might not even be read at all. So writers are afraid of that, I think—that the editor’s not going to read it. And then they’re afraid that they’re going to do something to tick the editor off. That they’re going to send the wrong piece and get a strike against them somehow. I do believe that, at least in the case of good literary editors, a writer would have to work really hard to submit something that would be, like, a blot on their record. Editors really do want to publish people.
ADB: Do you have any advice for aspiring editors in the world of publishing?
ES: Keep an open mind, always, to what you could publish. As an editor, I always felt like I had to be asking questions. Second-guessing myself. Is this change I’m suggesting the right change? Is it the best thing for the work? Am I imposing my ego on it? Am I being fair to the piece? So I was always asking a lot of questions like that. One of my pieces of advice is to be constantly vigilant and striving to do better than you did yesterday. That means honest self-assessment—whether it’s self-assessment about a piece you rejected that you shouldn’t have rejected, an edit you made that you shouldn’t have made, an edit you should have made that you didn’t, et cetera. Even your communications with an author, all those things, should be examined: Was I encouraging enough? Was I truly collaborative? Unclear? Inconsistent? It’s always a revision process, right?
ADB: Finally, what are you up to now?
ES: Writing. I have several novels to get out into the world. I’m starting my own little editing and self-publishing business—Stylite Books—so that’s in the works and has been in the works for a while. That’s probably one of the main things. I do have family—I have three adult kids—and I like interacting with them as well. I want to continue to be, as a parent, a support person to them when and if they need it. I’m thinking about new writing projects. I’m also doing some freelance editing; if anybody’s interested, I’m super reasonable and super good!
Evelyn and Rico
Evelyn Somers, former associate editor of the Missouri Review, has edited prize-winning short-story collections, scholarly work, memoirs, and both self-published and commercially published novels. She contributes to Bloom, an online publication featuring later-emerging writers. Evelyn is also a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals. She teaches literature and women and gender studies and cares for shelter cats. You can contact her via Stylite Books at http://stylitebooks.com.