"A great line editor is a miracle. . ."

In literature class, I'm teaching Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta" and Jayne Anne Phillips's "Home," so that sent me searching for articles about the former (follow this link for an interview with Braverman) and news of the latter. For Phillips, I found Nick Ripatrazone's memories of her as a teacher and editor in "Is Line Editing a Lost Art?"

"A great teacher is a gift. A great line editor is a miracle. Jayne Anne Phillips was both. Her pen-marked copies of my manuscripts were concise lessons in form and function. I sat in her office at Rutgers-Newark, and hung on her every observation. She conferenced with students the hour before our workshops. Those weren’t superficial conversations; Jayne Anne did real work. She went through the whole story, sentence to paragraph to page. She spoke about my stories—my shaky drafts, my ambitious scenes—as if they mattered. We respected her. She intimidated us—not because she was unkind. Because she was such a gifted writer.

"Like Jayne Anne, my undergraduate fiction professor grew up in West Virginia, and we read her short fiction in advance of her campus visit. Black Tickets possessed me. Other books would grab me—In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass, Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson—but Black Tickets was first. All writers need a book that makes them believe that words matter. Her book did that for me."