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Gatekeeper and mentor: Atlantic Editor C. Michael Curtis
As fiction editor at the Atlantic Monthly, C. Michael Curtis reads more than 12,000 short stories a year in search of the few that will appear in the pages of one of the most prestigious literary publications in the world. Curtis is both gatekeeper and mentor, guiding writers and their stories toward greater resonance and greater accomplishment. Curtis, who teaches creative writing at Wofford College in Spartanburg, discussed his career as an editor and a teacher Feb. 19, 2007, as part of the Hub City Writers Project reading series.
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Jeremy Jones: How did you come to be the fiction editor at the Atlantic?
C. Michael Curtis: I went to Cornell to study Hotel Administration, but eventually (not without difficulty) graduated as an English major. By my senior year I was Editor-in-Chief of the student Yearbook and an editor of the student newspaper, humor magazine, and literary magazine, and had worked for two summers at Newsweek magazine.
After graduation, I spent some time in the Army, then worked briefly at the New York Daily News before becoming a reporter at The Ithaca Journal, where I worked for two years. By that time I had begun to realize how little I knew and went back to school, to a Ph.D program in political science at Cornell. While there, I became the editor of a new student magazine, combining fiction and poetry and public events. I was also an editor of Epoch, a literary quarterly published by the Cornell English Department, a regular contributor to Cornell's Alumni News, a writer of continuity for an Ithaca radio station, and winner of the University's Academy of American Poets prize for student poetry.
As luck would have it, The Atlantic's poetry editor came to Cornell to read his work. We met, and he took back to Boston with him several poems, three of which eventually appeared in The Atlantic. (I haven't written fiction since graduate school, though my last story appeared in Cornell's literary magazine. I don't know why I stopped. Perhaps it seemed a luxury, since most writing I've done has been on assignment, and I've been busy -- editing, teaching, and sending children to college.)
In 1963, shortly after taking my doctoral oral exam, I got a call from The Atlantic's editor, offering me a job. I took a leave of absence from graduate school and moved to Boston, a wife and infant son in tow. I'm still on leave.
Jeremy Jones: In what ways has your understanding of the editor's role changed since the beginning of your career?
C. Michael Curtis: In the early stages of my editing career I imagined I was being paid to find mistakes and to correct them. As the years went by, I began to think more about preserving the writer's voice and avoiding an unconscious drift into my own. I've stopped being surprised by what seem obvious mistakes in grammar and syntax, realizing that writers in the midst of a creative rush pay less attention to grammatical precision than to the impulses that bring ideas, characters, and narrative to life.
As copy-editing at The Atlantic became more strenuous, in the early 1980s, I discovered an unexpected responsibility - to protect manuscripts, particularly fiction, from editing so aggressive (on the part of copy-editors and fact-checkers) that it threatened to launder all Atlantic writing to fit one mold, eliminating quirks in language and expression that gave the work its distinctiveness.
The most rewarding part of my job as editor is two-fold: Discovering publishable or near-publishable work by writers not yet known to the wider reading public, and helping to bring that work into public view; and helping to refine that work (making it clearer, more direct, more emphatic, more sensibly arranged, more true to the author's intention) before its appearance in the pages of The Atlantic.
Jeremy Jones: What has been your greatest editing challenge?
C. Michael Curtis: I can think of three:
Shortening stories far too long for The Atlantic format but so distinctive and artful that we hated to give them up. One early example was a story by Joyce Carol Oates, at the time a little known but already prolific writer of short fiction. Trimmed to half its original length, and retitled, the story appeared in The Atlantic in 1964 and was then chosen for inclusion in the O. Henry Prize Stories for that year and was awarded First Prize as the best of the stories in that collection.
A second challenge: working with writers (often poets who have turned to fiction) whose ideas about language have less to do with literal meaning than with the sound of the words, in isolation or in sequence. This kind of writer often resists the objection that he/she hasn't said what is plainly intended, and that other words would do a better job. "But I LIKE that word," he/she will say, "and why can't I use a noun as a verb, or vice versa?"
A third challenge lies in the use of language too frank or sulfurous for general audiences. When such language is fundamental to a story, can't be changed without damage to the intent or affect of the story, we usually just return it. In many cases, however, alternates are available and are often just as effective. Such revisions, however, require negotiation and patience. In recent years, frankly, The Atlantic has allowed language it would not have published in the 1960s, offending a handful of readers but probably going unnoticed by the vast majority, and certainly by those familiar with, and comfortable with, the loosening of artistic boundaries in all the arts.
Jeremy Jones: How does a short story work?
C. Michael Curtis: A short story can "work" in a number of ways, depending on the author's intentions. Some stories, the ones I tend to admire most, are "dynamic." That is, they move forward toward a resolution of some kind, and have a fulcrum, or transforming moment, for which the author prepares us, and toward which the action of the story is plainly directed. This transforming moment provides a change of some sort: a concrete change of circumstance, an illuminating and life-altering insight, a moment of clarity, an authentic glimpse of the self, or the like.
The other familiar story type is "static," or rooted in the moment. Such stories are meant to explore "How Things Are," rather than where they're going or ought to go. They depend upon shrewdness of insight, elasticity of language, a gift for weaving together apparently disparate elements into a revealing and organic whole. They illuminate problems rather than follow characters toward decisive action, and many are both shrewd about human behavior, and entertaining in their use of language and paradox.
If the story coheres, engages, moves its characters to a resolution of the tension that drives the narrative, then it "works." As a teacher, I try to guide the discussion of workshop material with questions calculated to underline narrative intent and to reveal what is incomplete, or overdrawn, insufficiently attended.
Jeremy Jones: How do you make a short story better?
C. Michael Curtis: You make a short story "better" by tightening its focus, by removing clumsy language and irrelevancies, by making more plausible what is otherwise improbable, by incorporating wit and juxtaposition, by sharpening dialogue, by leaving unsettled the mysteries of why we do what we do, even when clear answers seem right in front of us.
Jeremy Jones: I have heard you use the word "accomplished" to describe stories before.
C. Michael Curtis: "Accomplishment" in the short story can be any of a number of things. Some writers have a gift for dialogue that is pungent, or clipped, or convincingly regional, or amusing. Other writers are skillful at generating the sounds and smells, the setting for the actions of their stories. A story can be "accomplished" in these or other ways and still not quite work, or bring its elements into synch with each other.
Jeremy Jones: You've taught at Duke, Harvard, and most recently at Wofford. For over thirty years, you've taught an adult fiction workshop. How is teaching similar to editing?
C. Michael Curtis: Editing and teaching have much in common, though an editor starts with something of acknowledged value and seeks to improve it, while a teacher hopes to encourage something of value and worries less about the finer points of comma use than about initiative, reasoning, coherence, the magic of voice, the beginnings of structure. As teacher I work a lot with texts (the students' own, or others already in print), looking for signs of technique, ways of circling main ideas, examples of special effects. As editor, I'm involved in selecting works of special resonance and intelligence, already shaped by an understanding of grammar and language.
My effort, in such cases, is to help, in whatever way I can, to refine the final product.
Some who take my adult fiction workshop write at a professional level, though not always fiction. Others hope to find their way into uncharted waters. I'm interested in what goes wrong in fiction-writing, why literate, sensitive work goes unpublished. (Being "literate" and "sensitive" isn't enough. What's needed is "story," vitality, a good ear, an instinct for economy, and a realistic idea about how people behave and why.) I'm also interested in how we read, what we look for, or fail to notice, how we can begin to tell, and explain, why a story isn't working or isn't connecting with its intended audience. We meet once a week, on Tuesday nights in my home.
Jeremy Jones: What advice do you have for beginning writers?
C. Michael Curtis: Read a lot, in all fields, partly to see how other writers solve problems of dialogue, setting, pacing, theme, etc., and partly to become better grounded in the possibilities of form and become more aware of the models available.
"All fields" includes fiction, a lot of it. I use the phrase, however, to encourage simultaneous reading in history, philosophy, economics, religion, etc. As for genre writing, I doubt it helps much, and it teaches at least some bad lessons. But sometimes you just want to get away.
Understand that first drafts tend to be spontaneous, urgent, much-loved by their authors, and almost always in need of revision. But don't stop and edit in mid-sentence or mid-paragraph. Write the thing, while the creative impulse has you in its grip. Later on fix those run-on sentences, root out awkward repetitions, remove needless emphasis, sharpen dialogue, etc.
Don't expect to find a coherent, publishable voice overnight. Most writers produce a great many inept stories, or even novels, before the pieces begin to fall into place. A lot of practice is the usual solution.
A shorter version of this interview was published in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.
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