A Guest Editor's Notebook

While I was guest editing Borrowed Rooms last winter I kept a notebook, as I do with any long piece of work. Most of it is lists, crossings-out and phone numbers. But some entries say something about how an issue comes together, and a few people have asked me about the process since, so here are some of them, lightly edited.

October

First reading day. Thirty-one pieces in a pile on the kitchen table. I read them in the order they were given to me and did not make notes. Afterwards I walked around the block twice and wrote down the six I could still remember clearly. Five of them are in the issue.

Noticed that almost nobody has written about owning a home. Nearly everything is about renting, subletting, staying with relatives. Did not plan an issue about tenancy. It seems to be one anyway.

November

Long call with Joaquim about the ending of his story. He wanted to cut the last paragraph. I asked him to read it aloud to me instead. Halfway through he stopped and said, no, it stays. It stayed.

Sami sent a list instead of an essay. Nine addresses. I was not sure it would work on the page. Then I read it on the tram and missed my stop.

December

Choosing the order. Tried starting with the poem, then with the story. In the end the essay goes first, because it is the only piece that explains the title, and the poem goes second, because after a long essay a reader needs something they can finish on a staircase.

Watched Salt Ledger four times. It has nothing to do with rooms. It belongs at the end anyway, as a kind of breath out. Decided not to justify this in the note.

January

Proofs. Found a sentence in my own essay that said the same thing twice. Removed the second half. Found another. Removed it too. Began to suspect the essay was mostly sentences that said the same thing twice.

Wrote the editor's note in one sitting, at night, and did not change it. That almost never happens.

February

The issue went online on a Thursday morning. I read it on my phone on the way to work, the way most people would, and saw it for the first time as a reader rather than an editor. It looked smaller than it had felt. That is probably right. The best issues are the ones that feel larger from the inside.

Aurelia Stanek, guest editor of Borrowed Rooms