One of the weird joys of my editing life is sometimes being hired by my friends and getting to see what they’ve been up to lately. Sometimes this means being given forty-eight hours to copyedit a proposal that is still being worked on in a Google doc by five other people in the company. (They pay me well. This is not a complaint!) Or proofreading something as small but potentially nerve-wracking as a C.V. or an abstract for a journal publication.
For a stretch of about a year, last year, it meant getting to see what my friend Sylvia Nickerson, an artist (and academic), was up to. Every few months Sylvia would send me a new chapter or two of the graphic novel she was working on and I would give the text a copyedit and give her my thoughts on the overall story structure. Sometimes I would notice something actually amiss in the drawings, like that the numbers on the apartments in a hallway were numbered differently from one frame to the next — and consequently feel quite wonderful about myself.
Her novel is called Creation and is about such an interesting mix of things that I probably can’t do justice to it here, but: the city of Hamilton, ON, observing the process of gentrification and acknowledging participation in that as neighbourhoods with artist studios transform from places that artists are drawn to for cheaper rent into places that seem to buyers and developers arty and then no longer serve the lower-income population that was there before the artists rolled in. Becoming a mother, being told she will never succeed in completing her Ph.D. program as a mother and then doing so. Questioning the role of mother, the role of artist. I could go on.
When we were in university together Sylvia and I both initially lived in a group of residences that were called the Satellites because unlike the big purpose-built dorms on campus these were off the main campus in a collection of houses bought up by the university. Mine was called Bermuda and had been more extensively retrofitted into a sort of mini-dorm of about thirty rooms, funded by the Bermudian alumni association (there were more of these Bermudians than you might expect at a tiny Canadian university). The other houses, including Cuthbertson, where Sylvia and some other people I am still friends with today lived, were much smaller with just eight or ten rooms. One very cold day in that first winter, I arrived after my morning classes on the doorstep of Cuthbertson to see who was around and found a sign taped to the door, written in Sylvia’s pointy printing: I know one of you assholes took my OK Computer CD. Give it back.
Creation would have been picked up by a publisher whether or not Sylvia took any of my suggestions. Not every edit is a big, wrangling, all-consuming overhaul; sometimes being an editor is being the person whose desk the writer puts stuff on so that it’s not on their desk for a while, so that someone else is looking at it. That I got to see, before almost anyone else, the work that the person who left that notice on the front door made, twenty-odd years later, is frankly thrilling.
Creation is due out this October from Drawn & Quarterly. And if you’re in the Hamilton area, Sylvia has a show of illustrations from the novel up at The Assembly Gallery opening this Friday, April 12. Congratulations, my friend!
