That One Editor, a COVID-19 Happy Ending
By Robin McLean
There will probably be only a few Happy Ending stories when we’re all looking back at the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 (here’s hoping this is the correct end date). Happy Endings will likely be vastly outnumbered and overshadowed by the scope and magnitude of very sad, extremely tragic and long lasting Bad Endings. So when I got the opportunity to submit to the Humanities Heart to Heart series, I wondered if it was appropriate to submit at all since what I am submitting now could be called the Luckiest Turn of Events.
Here’s what happened:
I’m a writer. I live 10 miles south of the geographic center of Nevada out in the beautiful high desert of the Monitor Valley where I run a small writers’ retreat. I moved out there in summer of 2017 to re-immerse myself in the natural world of the West after some years in the East and to complete an American Western novel I’d started called Pity the Beast. In late 2019, I submitted my novel to my New York agent so she could find the perfect editor for the book. The hope was that, in turn, that perfect editor would love my book so much that they would talk their fantastic press into buying my book and publishing it. This is how the system works. You find an editor and they pull the press in. The golden rule, my agent always said is: “You only need to find ‘The One Editor.’ That one person who goes crazy over the book—that’s all we need.”
Seemed simple. I’d spent years of toil on the book. It was ready for the world and for an editor to deliver it.
My agent spent the end of 2019 carefully deciding which editors to send my book to, since you can only send your project to one editor per press. No second chances. If you aim at the wrong editor, one who only likes the book a lot but is not gaga over it, they will pass, and you lose your opportunity at that particular press until your next book.
My agent sent the book out in early January of 2020. She sent only to editors at presses who she believed could possibly take my book, based on the marketing models and missions of the publishers. She sent it to about seven or eight editors at very good presses. Our number one pick was a young editor, Jeremy Davies, at Farrar, Strauss, Giroux (FSG)—one of the best known literary presses in the United States. Authors and books from FSG have won every book prize known to humans and many, many times. Jeremy Davies had been at other excellent presses before FSG, and my agent felt he was the right guy for the book. In fact, the agent thought Jeremy Davies would be gaga over my novel.
Jeremy Davies had the book for only a few days when my agent got an excited text from him. He’d gotten 50 pages in and would finish over the weekend. I tried not to get too excited. The book is not your standard western, and it’s complex. Jeremy Davies could lose interest.
He did not lose interest. He called my agent the next week and wanted Pity the Beast.
My agent and I celebrated—but not too much.
“That’s only the first step,” she said. “Now Jeremy has to talk the FSG management into the book, and that’s harder.”
February. It turned out to be impossible. Presses need to be able to guess how many books will sell, and my book seemed too risky to this fine old press. So we’d found the One Editor—that elusive and sometimes non-existent perfect editor for a particular book—but he would not be able to sell the idea of my book to management.
Meanwhile, back in the larger world, a virus that had started in China a month earlier, that had seemed to be a far-away problem, nothing to do with my book and me, was traveling in the cells of cruise ship and airline passengers back to North America. It landed in Seattle, San Antonio, New York City. As my agent and I licked our wounds of disappointment about FSG, people started getting sick in America. As we waited for other interested editors…who just sort of went silent…Americans started to die.
April. Out in the Monitor Valley, all the writers retreats and workshops planned for the summer of 2020 were cancelled. Writers who had planned to come to work at the ranch were holed up in homes across the United States and the world. My partner’s work contract was cancelled for the summer—his busy season that brought in the income to get us through the winter months. Plans that had seemed so promising a few months before had wilted and possibly died. I heard from other writers that the US publishing industry, which is based in New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic, had “paused.” Presses were not able to sell books since the bookshops were closed down for COVID-19. The presses were losing big money. Editors were being laid off, the young new editors first, last one in, first one out.
At about the same time my partner got laid off, I heard from my agent that Jeremy Davies had been laid off too at FSG. Shortly thereafter, one of the books he had acquired and edited at FSG in 2019, The Undying by Anne Boyer, co-won the Pulitzer. I imagined this man, this stranger, and the whiplash of highs and lows he must be experiencing due to this disease. To win a highest prize an editor can receive in the United States and to be let go from work at the same time. I knew Jeremy would have to pop again somewhere else. It was spectacular news too—that someone who has such great literary taste had loved my work. And so sad. All of it.
I emailed my agent: “Maybe we’ll meet up with Jeremy Davies again.”
With my partner home all summer we decided to build a fence for a garden. We’d never been able to keep the rabbits, wild horses, and donkeys out. Now we could. May. We planted beet and spinach seeds. We pulled the hoses out. We used creek water to sprinkle the parched earth. Sprouts popped up. I started to feel some hope. Certainly, that young crack editor Jeremy Davies would have to be hired elsewhere sometime. And I would be ready when he did. A few intrepid writers also came to the ranch. A poet from California. A non-fiction writer from the Texas-Mexico border writing about Tex-Mex border immigration in relations to her Catholic faith. In the remote high plains desert, we were in the safest, most healthful place on earth, while others, like my 85-year-old dad, were alone in homes and apartments, terrified.
August. We still had not heard a peep from the handful of the other editors who received the submitted novel. This was to be expected in what was now a full-blown global pandemic with no vaccine in sight. I tried not to whine too much about literary failure when health and financial disaster was striking so many.
In September, I saw an online post about Jeremy Davies. He’d been snapped up by a vibrant, ambitious “shamelessly literary” press called And Other Stories. We sent the novel to him at the new press, and it was accepted one week later. They took my second collection of short fiction stories also. So it turned out that the One Editor for my book simply needed to find the One Press for himself, and that took some time. It took a global collapse of a scale humans have known before but not in most of our lifetimes.
In the fall before we started editing Pity the Beast, another of Jeremy’s acquisitions at FSG (At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop) won the Booker International Prize for translations. And Other Stories set the publication for Pity the Beast on a fast track to correspond with their tenth anniversary. My novel is their 103rd book. It was published on November 2, has been reviewed favorably by several major US newspapers, and I’ll be on the BBC in the next few weeks.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The pandemic has certainly caused horrible events for many people. Due to my extremely good fortune I admit to feeling a little “survivor's guilt” at my good luck. I could allow that guilt to keep me quiet. Or perhaps I can share this story as a testament to balance and stability in a world perceived to be in flux.
Photographs courtesy of Robin McLean.
Robin McLean worked as a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize. Her debut novel, Pity the Beast, was published on November 2, 2021. She now lives and teaches in the high plains desert of central Nevada at Ike’s Canyon Ranch Writer’s Retreat, which she co-founded.
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