When it's good to be an editor

I pretty much would always rather be a writer than an editor. So it always surprises me just how much pleasure can be found in the editing part of my job.

I'm frantically pulling together the soon-to-be-current issue, and just picked a couple of poems by a young writer named Leah Heywood for the "Home Scholars" section. It was difficult to make a choice, since Leah's poems are so good. She's fourteen, and has been writing since pretty much ever; and she decided to publish a book of her work with Lulu. I got wind of this and ran over to take a look, and have been enjoying myself since my own copy of said book arrived in the mail.

I got permission to use a few poems in the magazine, and it was difficult to decide which I should use. Some are funny, some thoughtful, some wistful, some sad. All are very, very good. Not good considering they're by a young writer. Just plain good.

One poem, I knew I absolutely had to include. Not because it was necessarily better than the others, but because of the subject matter.

Growing up, I was a very bookish girl in a very unbookish suburb. Which was bad enough. But I also had (and have) a non-stop imaginary universe going on that admirers of the Brontes may understand. The various worlds spinning in my mind were far more precious to me than the so-called real one.

I tried explaining this once or twice, but I only ever got funny looks or worse. So I kept this huge part of my existence to myself -- but I never stopped looking for some clue that I wasn't the only one who walked in several worlds at once.

Reading a biography of the Brontes was a thrill, because not only did four children in one family have this state of mind, but three of them were geniuses. I was surprised, while reading Edith Wharton's autobiography, to come across a brief chapter about her own inner universe, which was (in nature if not in details) very much like my own. And I was thrown across the room when I read Edith Olivier's The Love Child, which was not only by a pretender (as I called my tribe), but was a novel about one.

So at least I wasn't the only one. But I didn't learn that until I was an adult.

It would have meant so much to me to have known as a child that I wasn't insane or alone.

And so when I came across Leah Heywood's poem "Unseen Friends," about how, when other company is wanting, Leah will go and socialize with people in her mind, I knew immediately that I had to run it. Fly the flag for some other lonely bookish sort: you're not the only one who cares as much (or more) about the people who exist only in your mind as you do about the ones everyone can see. We're a small clan, but a real one.

Now, if you haven't already, go write down some of the conversations you have with your inside friends, because I can tell you from experience that decades from now, you'll be happy you did.

And who knows? Maybe someone else will be glad, too.