Manuscript & editorial consultation

The hardest editorial work has little to do with fixing sentences — it's hearing what a manuscript is trying to become, and helping it get there. I read at the structural level: where a book's argument loses its thread, where a poetry collection's real spine is hiding two sections too early, where a contemplative text lands the thing it means and where it only circles it. I bring three vantages to this — a working poet with one collection in print and another forthcoming, a doctoral writer who has had to rebuild his own long manuscript more than once, and an editor who has shaped other people's books toward the form they were reaching for. I work in service of what your writing is already doing at its best, showing you that and showing you what stands between the manuscript and the whole of it. Developmental and structural reading, for poetry, contemplative writing, and scholarly work alike.