For my part, it has struck me to see that I might have seemed a bit like a whale that leaps to the surface of the water disturbing it momentarily with a tiny jet spray and lets it be believed, or himself does in fact indeed believe, that down in the depths where no one sees him any more, where he is no longer witnessed nor controlled by anyone, he follows a more profound, coherent and reasoned trajectory.
—Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth
consummate editing for
creative and unusual voices…for writing that wants to matter
fiction • creative non-fiction • unshackled academic
I edit being.
The question that is suspended over the writing: how to edit that strange inexpressible thing that lives, however unlikely, between words strung helplessly and haplessly together by an artist’s will and daring? Writing edited to allow, directly or indirectly, insights into a kind of sustenance, like water, essential, mysterious—without which we die, without which the work I do would wither—so rare, to savor for some time to come.
Language is a live thing, a movement of a particular personality, unlike any other, in need of what I might call depth- or emotional-editing—editing through which the writer’s syntax breathes on the page, freed from obstructions between writing and reader. Some kinds of writing might ask a reader to get lost in the maze of language, in the parables of form and sedimentary meanings, while others simply say what needs to be said, directly, taking the reader to the very omphalos.