Magali Román was born in Buenos Aires and earned a dual B.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia (covering European History and English Literature). Having worked as a writer for four years and contributed to numerous publications across that period, Magali undertook an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh beginning in 2018. While on the program, Magali and a number of other Edinburgh MSc students collaborated to publish From Arthur’s Seat, a collection of poetry and prose by colleagues, prizewinners, and University of Edinburgh faculty. From Arthur’s Seat is the fourth installment in an anthology series begun in 2016 and breaks new ground with its definitive structure and style.
In this interview, Ogilvie editors Calder Hudson and Angela Hicks ask Magali Román about her definitive approach to the From Arthur’s Seat publishing process.
One of the taglines for the 2019 From Arthur’s Seat is ‘You are about to start on an adventure.’ Was it also an adventure to put together and edit? What were your main priorities when you and your team set about creating the anthology?
The tagline emulates the choose-your-own-adventure structure of the anthology, but I think anything that involves 30 writers working together is by definition going to be an adventure. When I was planning this year’s anthology (the fourth!), I really just wanted to make something new–something that would set our year apart from what had been done before. Each volume of From Arthur’s Seat has consistently improved on its predecessors. I wanted our contribution to go further, to examine and reconstruct what an anthology could be. There is an element of adventure in trying something completely new, so the feeling was in the project from the beginning.
You have been a writer for many years. Were any of the skills you developed through your experience as a writer of particular use to you as editor-in-chief?
I think the best skill you can cultivate as a writer and editor is to be realistic. When editing somebody’s work, you have to be completely honest with what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise you’re wasting people’s time. As an editor, it’s your job to get the writer to fulfill their highest potential. That doesn’t come from coddling people or beating them down with criticism. It’s a weird balance that requires you to be honest with yourself and with your writer about whether you’re both doing the best job you are capable of.
As editor-in-chief I think it’s also important to be realistic about your goals and the work it takes to achieve them. I wanted to run FAS like a professional publishing house, so I delegated a lot and tried to steer my team to follow the vision I’d set for the book. We formed the team in October and set project deadlines six months before anybody submitted a first draft. When you start a project you’re really excited about, you have a million ideas and it’s very easy to overpromise and underdeliver. You have to be realistic with your time, and what you can achieve with the resources you have. How much good work can you realistically get done, considering that you are working with people who have full course-loads to worry about? I think it’s quite easy to get overwhelmed in this position, but I never did because I always knew that we had set the right goals for our team and we had the resources to deliver. We were ambitious, but not delusional.
In the adventure-choosing vein, you’ve included a small section towards the start of the book which provides readers with an alternate way to read the anthology beyond just going cover-to-cover; they can read along thematic and narratives using the guidelines provided. What was the inspiration for this? How early in the editing process was this structure decided on?
It is actually hugely hilarious that I came up with this idea because I normally find most postmodernist lit gimmicky. But anthologies, to me, present a really interesting chance to play around with structure. In an anthology each story and poem stands on its own as it is, but they also belong to a larger, unified physical book. When I was reading through everyone’s submissions, I realized that certain common themes kept coming up: isolation, surveillance, the act of writing, fatherhood, war, et cetera. I grabbed all the submissions and made different piles, mixing poems and stories that seemed like they could have taken place in the same universe. The stories were great on their own, but putting them together as chapters of a larger story added new layers of meaning. It made the reading experience fresh and exciting. I was also watching the film “Bandersnatch” at the time and thought the episodic nature of an anthology–stories that stand alone but share certain themes–would lend itself really well to a choose-your-own-adventure structure.
I came up with this structure and ran it by Merel de Beer, our executive editor, and then presented the concept to our editorial team. It was important for me to have feedback on it because I wasn’t sure if the idea would be too weird to pull off. But I think this concept has really allowed the anthology to present each writer as both an individual and as part of a collective. It also allowed us to connect prose with poetry. Poets and fiction writers are traditionally kept separate in our program, but poetry and fiction are intrinsically linked together, so it was important to us to present them as two sides of the same coin. Writing is such a lonely act–it’s important to remember that we form part of a larger community that is always there, even if we don’t realize it.
Setting up the different narrative paths must have taken some doing, all while organizing the rest of the analogy to boot! Was it difficult to decide the themes and to fit all the stories into one and only one? Did you consult with writers about the themes, or did you extrapolate them from the anthology as a whole?
As editor-in-chief I was responsible for issuing final edits on every story and poem, so I was intimately familiar with the themes present in each piece, and mostly likely had had a conversation with the writer about what ideas that had inspired their work. Merel and I picked out the themes (which we called threads) together over a few brainstorming sessions. We did not consult with the writers mostly because we felt that as editors we were distanced enough to look at the big picture. We didn’t want to rewrite people’s stories for them so we designed the choose-your-own-adventure structure to be subtle. If you don’t read the instructions at the beginning of the book you probably wouldn’t know that there’s anything different about this anthology.
You all developed From Arthur’s Seat while also continuing your MSc. Was balancing the ‘down-to-earth’ editing process while also writing creatively on a regular basis a challenge at all, or did the two projects act as good counterweights to each other? Did working on the anthology provide any opportunities or cause any challenges?
I actually loved the ‘down-to-earth’ editing process because it felt like a real job. I think graduate school can sometimes feel like you’re play-acting at being a writer–perhaps you’re writing stuff that your peers approve of or your professors reward with good grades, but in the real world success depends on getting published. Your classmates owe you critique and your professors owe you advice, but the publishing industry doesn’t owe you anything. I wanted to lead this project because I wanted to know what it was like to do it for real, whether my ideas would translate into good sales and whether people would actually like what we had to say. Mostly I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.
I did find it challenging to prioritize my own writing at times with so many deadlines to manage. Being in charge means you have to work for everyone else, so your own projects often have to take a backseat. And a big part of being in charge is having to say no, even to yourself, and standing by that no. There’s always going to be people who dislike your creative choices or think they could do better, but part of your job is to trust in your vision and stick to it. Honestly, sometimes it’s not about making everyone happy but rather about pissing off the right people. That’s when you know you have something good.
At the end of the publication process, you also helped organize launch events for the anthology alongside the team’s event planners. What was that experience like? Did it feel like an extension of the publication process, or something separate? Was it exciting or nerve-wracking to share the anthology with people outside of the MSc?
We were really lucky to have two event planners in the team who organized a wonderful event, because for me presenting a book was an extremely nerve-wracking experience. I consider myself a pretty good editor but I hate talking in public and I’d never presented anything that I was so involved in, so I was pretty anxious the entire night. Seeing our writers’ parents and friends come to support them made up for it, though.
In addition to launch events, From Arthur’s Seat also had team members dedicated to social media and also had a podcast. What inspired you to pursue these angles as a team?
My ultimate goal for this anthology was to promote our writers and their talents. FAS is technically a student project but we packaged it as a professional, independent anthology of new writing. When we looked into expanding into social media and audio, the definitive question was always, ‘what can we do to jump-start our writers into their careers?’ Can we give them a social media campaign? Can we get them talking on a podcast about their inspiration? Can we get them to perform live? A new anthology comes out every year, so we wanted some footprint of our authors to live on after the books sold out.
As young aspiring writers, we spent all year listening to people tell us (in the nicest, most soothing way possible) that we’re probably never going to make any money off our writing. We had an opportunity to provide people with publishing experience, so I wanted to give everyone who wanted it the chance to develop a skill that could go on their CV after the program ended. What can they contribute to the team, beyond writing? Are they interested in audio production, event planning, web design? I wanted people to be able to get jobs out of this experience if they wanted, so expanding FAS into audio and digital gave us the chance to develop those skills. Of course it helped that we had talented people on our team who were really passionate about those areas.
What was it like editing an anthology which also contains your own writing?
It’s weird; I don’t really consider myself a writer in this anthology. I kind of forget that one of my stories is also in this book. I don’t know why–maybe because I spent so much time editing and talking to people about their work and so little time thinking about my own writing. It was easy for all the editor tasks to get in the way of your own creative work, so I would often kind of leave my own rewrites until the last minute. If I could do it again I’d probably try to remind myself that I’m a writer too, not just an editor. That being said, I had a job to do, and if my own writing had to take a backseat for a few months to make a beautiful book for everyone else then so be it.
Is there anything else you feel shouldn’t go unsaid when it comes to the anthology–both regarding its development, and now that it’s out in the world?
This anthology looks like it does because of the work of a lot of people. Designers, editors, PR managers, and mentors are just as important to a publication as the writers whose work you read. Nobody accomplishes anything alone.
More students are beginning the Creative Writing MSc in Autumn of 2019; is there any advice you’d offer the next group of Creative Writers about the anthology publishing process–or, indeed, any general advice you’d offer any writers, reflecting on your experience?
Start as early as you can and be as ambitious as you can. There are no rules to the process at all. When we started the only thing we were expected to do was make a book. By the time we finished not only did we have a book, but we had a website and a podcast. So why not go further? That would be my advice for whoever comes after us. Go further. Why not? Why not make an audiobook, a zine, a documentary, FAS merch? Who’s going to stop you?
From Arthur’s Seat is now available in stores and online, with more information available via the anthology’s website (as well as Twitter and Facebook). You can read more from Magali (including a selection of her short stories) via her website.