What Editors Talk About

It’s a scary thing, as an editor, to reveal the dilemmas and principles that guide this usually invisible process. But my conversation with the amazing Lisa Grgas—who joined World Editions last year—left me feeling encouraged. Initially, my intention was simply to get to know our new team member, given how far I live from the New York hub. After just a few emails, I wasn’t just left impressed with her mind; I also came away with a sense of real comradery and mission.

The delightfully slow-burning email exchange brought into sharp relief that, as publishing professionals, we must take our social responsibilities seriously, and we must keep taking risks. They’re unavoidable, if we want to keep doing what we do: to try to look deeply, and with care, into precisely those things which it would be so much easier to avoid. In this spirit, I hope our abridged conversation will be of interest to those readers who are curious about the behind-the-scenes of World Editions.

—Shimanto

SHIMANTO REZA (SR): It was great to talk a bit in person the other day. Our discussion of the manuscript we’re working on—about a man who co-opts the perspective of an abused woman—has stuck with me. For a moment, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that I’ve been grappling with similar themes in recent times. But I now think this might just be because they are fundamental. And it seems a good sign that this novel, scheduled for publication in 2026, has already led us to have these kinds of conversations!

LISA GRGAS (LG): I enjoyed speaking with you, too. And, yeah, I agree with you that it’s no coincidence that these themes are recurring. There’s definitely a bit of an “abuser trope” in contemporary literature—narratives where a (usually male) mentor uses their position of power to manipulate a (usually female) mentee. When done well, and respectfully, this kind of abuse isn’t just a plot device. It’s a reflection of a real grappling with power dynamics and the consequences of trauma. I’m proud of World Editions for acquiring manuscripts that rise to the challenge of addressing these topics, which can be polarizing and triggering for readers. 

SR: Coincidentally, this week, I finished a first draft of my first full-length novel translation for publication (hurrah!): Oroppa by Safae el Khannoussi, a Moroccan-Dutch author. At multiple levels, the novel deals with the question of the representation of underrepresented voices. All the ways in which these very voices can be co-opted, exoticized, simplified to fit some image, of a poor victim or a glorious rebel … The two main characters are artists, a poet and a painter. Both have been unjustly imprisoned and brutally tortured as students during the Moroccan Years of Lead. They come to Europe, and one becomes successful, the other doesn’t. The former, at the height of her success, suddenly disappears and wants all her paintings to be burned. The latter has never had the courage to perform her poetry, only occasionally disseminating them by posting them into random letterboxes. She never writes in her own language, Arabic. Some would see this as a concession to the colonizer, but she would consider writing in her own language, Arabic, to be the ultimate betrayal, for reasons she doesn’t explain. It has something to do, I believe, with the desire not to give people any illusion of having “direct access” to her. The translation happens within.

Translators struggle with this question. What does it mean to do justice to the original work? Does it mean to become as transparent as possible to it? This is, I believe, no longer an acceptable position. We put the names of translators on the cover, not just to acknowledge their work, but also to be transparent about the impossibility of transparency. You are reading this particular person’s translation, and this particular person didn’t write the original. But of course, the whole point of translation is to grant some kind of access to an original text you could not otherwise read. What do you think about this question of access? Does it seem important to you?

LG: Congratulations on finishing your draft! You say that Oroppa deals with co-opting, exoticizing, and simplifying underrepresented voices—and I’m thrilled to hear that. That’s kind of what I was driving at when I said that some texts can fall into a trap of using abuse—whether sexual abuse, like in the manuscript we’re working on, or physical torture like in Oroppa—as a plot device. You know … texts that, I guess, trivialize the seriousness of the topics they explore. So, I’m looking forward to reading the translation. 

The question of access is interesting. I’d agree that translation does give some kind of access to an original text. But, yeah, it’s not direct access. I’m honestly not troubled by that. Maybe it’s because I’m primarily a poet and I’m all about refraction and ambiguity. But it’s also because one of my first forays into translation was via Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. I think I bought it at an AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference on impulse. Anyway, the book presents original poems in their native language, plus three translated versions in English. (Each series of four poems is followed by a commentary, too.) I can’t read the originals, but it’s so interesting to gain access to them through a side-by-side comparison of three high-quality translations. It’s a cool book. Rather than feeling disconnected from the original—because I can’t have direct access to it—I feel, I guess, a superabundant access to each poem via the translations. 

SR: So these novels—the manuscript we’re working on, and Oroppa—interestingly enough, are preoccupied with ethical questions that are central to the process of translation (and editing!). And it makes sense, somehow. Novels are so effective at representing the subjective experience. It seems so much of our subjective experience is preoccupied with the experience of others, and the degree to which our own experience has been effectively shared …

LG: OK, we’re diving into some Big Topics: appropriation, underrepresented voices … and I’m going to throw in trauma, too. 

Both the manuscript we are working on for 2026 and El Khannoussi’s Oroppa grapple with these themes—although the approaches are very different. Years ago, I read “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” by Parul Sehgal for The New Yorker. I was working in clinical research at a PTSD Center at NYU Langone at the time, and one of my jobs was to record myself reading patients’ descriptions of the traumatic events they had lived through. If I remember correctly, the patients then listened to the recordings at home, possibly as a means at achieving desensitization. So, I was curious about the power of trauma stories—both real and fictional—and came across Sehgal’s article. I just looked it up again to pull a sentence that had struck me. Sehgal wrote: “The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.”

If this is true, one of the challenges of translating and editing books that center on trauma and/or appropriate the voice of someone who has experienced trauma—especially if that someone is from an un- or under-represented group—is to not flatten, distort, or reduce the character. I’m skimming the Sehgal article as I write to you, and I noticed that the expanded definition of “trauma” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual now includes over 600,000 combinations of symptoms that can be attributed to PTSD. That alone provides tons of opportunity for fiction writers to explore how trauma may present itself—symptomatically—in a character. But, obviously, a catalogue of symptoms is not enough. 

For a trauma plot to work, the author (and translator, and editor) must resist the temptation to fall back on easy explanations or cliches and do the hard work of creating a nuanced character. Part of that hard work, I think, is constant re-examination: Why is this story mine to tell? Why does the story need to be told in an appropriated voice? What are my motivations? Are my motivations worthy?

SR: These reflections are making me dizzy. All I know is that, after our little editorial meeting, I almost felt like, for the sake of disclosure, we should be adding the names of the editors on the cover, too! (jk)

LG: Ha! Adding the names of editors to book covers … Could you imagine? When I try that on, my initial reaction is, “Hmm, interesting.” But, now that I’ve given in a few minutes thought, I’m a firm, “NEVER!” Editing is hard and important work, but one that, I think, should be largely invisible. 

Part of my hard-lining on this is due to my own experience trying to publish a personal essay many, many years ago. It was solicited by a Big Deal Journal and then edited into oblivion over the next several months. Some of the edits were worthwhile. But others changed the objective of my piece and, worse, misconstrued events in a way that made me uncomfortable. I had to make the tough decision to either allow the Big Deal Journal to take over my voice (and life story) as an essayist or accept only the edits that would serve my work and risk losing the opportunity altogether. (Spoiler, I chose my voice.) 

I share that anecdote mainly as a means of illustrating what I am not. I am not an editor that wants to steer the ship. The author is the helmsman, I am the pilot, providing guidance. (I probably used the terms incorrectly.)

SR: I’m curious to hear how you plan to approach your first edit of a translated book? Will it be any different from your work at The Literary Review?

LG: The Literary Review was an important journal, in my totally unbiased opinion, because we took a very hands-off approach to the material selected for publication. Many (maybe most?) of the pieces were selected from unsolicited submissions after having gone through a slightly manic review process (usually 1 undergraduate intern, 2 readers, 1 assistant editor, and 1 genre editor). If a submission successfully made it through that many sets of eyes, and that many different aesthetics, we tended to trust that the work was solid as-written. Suggested edits may have been made, but I don’t recall in my 20 years with TLR ever “accepting” any piece with contingencies. I love TLR for many reasons, but chief among them was Minna Proctor’s (the EOC’s) faith in the writers she published and unequivocal support for their work. It also makes TLR extra fun to read; it’s never over-polished or predictable. (I miss TLR so much!!!)

I think my approach to my first edit for World Editions will be similar, in the sense that I have no desire to foist my own sensibilities on a writer. My job as an editor is to read the manuscript,  understand what the writer is trying to achieve, and focus my edits on elevating the text to meet the writer wherever they want to be. When I mark up a manuscript, I tend to ask questions—sometimes indirectly, like by asking the author to consider what effect a word, scene, or dialogic exchange has on the text. Sometimes that prompt alone is enough to open up space for the author to make their own revisions—and that’s my preference. I want the authors I work with to always feel that their work is theirs alone. 

SR: It’s so interesting to reread your email months later—I read it shortly after receiving it, but didn’t have the time to properly respond at the time. Since then, I’ve had a long conversation with Carl Nixon about Nikki D., his novel about a photographer’s abuse of an underage girl. (Which he’s writing and we’re editing in English.) It seems all the same themes have come up there. It feels a little dangerous to talk about an editorial process that is underway. Shall we try? And now that I begin writing this, I find I’d like to first ask you what your experience of the process has been so far. There are several layers here: the author has written a novel from the perspective of a man who is telling the story of a woman who was abused as a child. There is the question of the male narrator’s telling of that woman’s story, but at the same time of the male author’s. And then there is the role of agents and editors, which might be said to involve similar questions—we impact the author’s voice as well as the voice of the character, a victim of abuse. Which should be “prioritized”? Is that a productive question to ask?

LG: Eep, these are very difficult questions … I’ll start with the easier one (what’s my experience of the editorial process been like so far). I’m still getting the hang of it and figuring out my approach. I’ve never worked with a Style Guide before so I do need to adjust my process of editing—slow down, refer to the Guide, double and triple check with you!—until it’s ingrained enough that I can get into the flow. At a less process-driven level, I am thinking a lot about how much or little of an impact I should have on the author’s voice as it’s channeled through the characters. On the one hand, TLR was pretty hands-off, and I’m comfortable with that. But I’m also opinionated and I have impulses that could definitely veer into the territory of over-editing if I’m not careful. 

I do think the question of prioritization is a valid and productive question. I also think the answer, for me, is “it depends…” 

SR: I just finished the article you shared about the trauma narrative (“The Case Against the Trauma Plot” by Parul Sehgal). Interestingly, Nixon’s novel is about trauma, or at least events that could be traumatic, in a very direct way—but the traumatic childhood events aren’t bubbling under the surface of an adult’s story; instead, they make up the bulk of the story. But much of the editorial process has been focused on the shorter sections which do show the main character as an adult. It seems the work we’re doing there could be seen, through the lens of Parul Sehgal’s article, as a grappling with the question of cause and effect. After portraying abuse, as the narrative moves into the future, how can the chapters about that future not be read as determined by trauma? I see a territory opening up, between the message that “the victim has total agency and freedom” on the one hand, and “the victim is doomed by necessity” on the other. Each of which seems to have such immense political implications that it becomes difficult to engage with frankly and openly. The territory in between seems the right place to explore.

LG: Absolutely. The territory in between is probably the only place to explore. I might argue that any victim of abuse can be “doomed by necessity” sometimes. And I’m icked out at the idea that any one of us has “total” agency and freedom. We live in the world, don’t we? Some of us get lucky and have moments of agency and freedom (let me not comment on “total”). On a more basic level, isn’t it true that our lives are determined (at least in part) by what came before the present moment? I wish that fewer of us have lived through trauma—but, again, we live in the world, so many, many of our real-life narratives follow a trajectory that’s sometimes inflected by that/those trauma(s). It’s totally appropriate for that also to be reflected in fiction. But I’m wary of anything (book or otherwise) that makes such a bold claim that trauma’s at the wheel always. Or never. I don’t think those types of claims are fair … or accurate.

SR: I love the hands-off approach you talk about. I wonder whether you think there are times when more involvement can be good? Perhaps involvement of a different kind—a kind of collaborative, supportive role. As editors, we can serve as sounding boards and even cheerleaders encouraging our authors to explore freely and trust their process. Is that a good way to be involved?

LG: I agree that an editor worth their salt will, through their presence and support, serve as a constant reminder to authors to trust their process and their gut. Funnily, this question reminds me of my local writers group. It’s a great group of people. Mostly fiction writers, but all doing their own thing in terms of genre. I don’t know whether anyone finds my feedback remotely useful, though, because I mostly ask questions: What are you trying to achieve? Have you read X, Y, Z authors? What do you think would happen if you did A, B, C? And I usually follow it up with a list of words and phrases that I especially loved or found effective. I started this because I was out of my element giving specific feedback—these are real fiction writers and I’m primarily a poet—but I’ve stuck with it because I hope it helps with that process of exploration. I don’t know how well this translates outside of my writers group, but I think helping authors articulate their vision, suggesting other texts to read and think about, and reinforcing the stuff that works well (for me) could be part of the supportive role you’re describing. 

Your use of “sounding board” for some reason made me think of authors who are in a crisis mode, feeling stuck, self-doubting, overwhelmed, etc., etc. Maybe that’s not what you meant, but I’ll address that, too. I do think it’s appropriate for editors to help bail out a sinking ship. We all need to set our own boundaries with that sort of thing so how that plays out (if it does) is context- and relationship-specific. At the barest minimum, most people in my life know I’m a good person to go to for a (usually expletive-ridden) pep talk. You’re feeling stuck? Be stuck! It’s temporary. Self-doubting? F- that, you’re amazing. Someone wrote a negative review? Who gives a sh-t? Love your work. And if you can’t love it right now, remember I do. 

SR: I’ll keep this one shorter, encouraging us (myself mostly) to respond spontaneously and avoid overthinking.

LG: I tried to do the same and now am having a creeping feeling that I am not doing a good job of discussing trauma. So, I’ll stop typing and overthink it in bed.