When did you first realize that editors are people, too? Oh, sorry. Okay, let us be the one to break the news: editors put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us (except, we suppose, those who do that two-legged, lying back on the bed thing). Of course, sometimes editors can be too human, as Tod Goldberg discovers when he interviews Gina Frangello, editor of Other Voices (“Cities in Dust”? That should never be admitted, especially when it can come back to haunt you). Goldberg’s been guesting over at The Elegant Variation, so don’t stop at this interview…
We enjoyed the fact that Frangello is, well, just as crazy as the rest of us:
When I was an undergraduate, the guys in my workshops always liked my stories and the women sometimes didn’t–they tended to say my characters were “unsympathetic”–so when I first started submitting to lit mags when I was 21 or 22, I preferred to submit to male editors. If an editor had an Italian surname, I’d get a warm and fuzzy vibe thinking that person would publish my work, even though most of my fiction that portrayed Italian-Americans at ALL didn’t tend to feature very “positive” portrayals.
