MIR Issue 4 - Preface

When we five writers came together to form the editorial team for the fourth issue of The Mechanics’ Institute Review, we expected to gain knowledge and experience of publishing a literary magazine. Our expectations were met: we discovered the work required to put a book on a shop shelf – and on a website. However, we discovered something else, too, something we did not perhaps expect to learn about writing and reading. We came to appreciate how the creations that appear in our heads as writers end up as ink on pages, between covers, being read.

Now, as the magazine goes to press, we are able to reflect on our role as editors in bringing those creations – the products of quiet isolated moments – before an audience.

We defined a vision, deciding what we wanted our magazine to represent and achieve. As writers and readers who admire and value short stories, we resolved to showcase and champion that form. Equally important, we identified our intended audience. With this framework in mind, we sought out high-quality stories from the new voices on Birkbeck’s Creative Writing courses. We sifted through the quantities of submissions we received, discussed their merits and limitations and our responses to them. Each of us had our doubts and convictions, but any conflicts were resolved amicably – through asking the question, ‘What’s best for MIR?’ – and we made our final selection as a like-minded team. Then came the task of contacting those writers whose stories we had accepted and those we had not, knowing both the pleasure and disappointment we would cause.

Our selection made, we now had to bring these carefully drawn visions to a point where the reader would see them as the authors had. Our own stories were subjected to rigorous yet considerate scrutiny by our mentor, from whom we learnt how to suggest, massage, reorganize, polish and refine – how to help realize another writer’s invention; how to edit. Then, in a café or seminar room, we met a living person – the author – whom, it seemed, we already slightly knew. We asked, ‘Is this what you want to show?’ And sometimes they replied at length and articulately, and sometimes, with a worried look, ‘I just wrote it . . .’ So, with both the knowing and the instinctive writer, we worked through what their stories meant. Together we tried to ensure that these meanings would be grasped by our intended readers – be they an experienced judge, or a fresh, curious mind, both, however, searching for new ideas or unfamiliar angles on life.

We returned to the team with our reworked pieces and set out the stories by student writers, some with little knowledge or experience of bringing their work to the public. Beside these we put pieces generously provided by established authors, who perhaps recall the time they too were unpublished, and now, with their works in the bookshops, are happy to sit alongside, and lend their support to, newcomers. With our reader always in mind, we juggled and shuffled, paired and split the voices, tones, tenses, themes, locations and formats, until we had constructed a whole, a book to be dipped into or read from cover to cover. And then we dispatched these pieces, of which we had been the guardians, to the next stages of the process – copy-editing, typesetting, proof-checking – and, finally, to a printer on the other side of the country, awaiting their return in eye-catching covers and smooth paper, with attractive and clear type, as our book.

While we wait, we reflect on how this process has affected us, both as readers and as writers. We all knew what it is to open a book and immerse ourselves in its world. We knew a little, through our writing workshops and varying experiences, of what it is to be a writer, to be read and discussed. But now that we have helped nurture other writers’ work for publication, we know the full process our own creations must go through to be appreciated as we first hoped they would. We know that the raw material we originally produce requires attention – continuously from us and periodically from a generous collection of others – to strike that chord we want to be heard.

So we five writers can return to our quiet solitude furnished with a new appreciation of the processes that begin and end here, with this magazine. Reading a story, we might wonder where its author started, how she pursued her idea, eventually producing a piece she felt was developed enough to be exposed to someone else’s comments and suggestions. We think of the work that was done, the discussions and revisions, leading to the final version. Or perhaps, as writers, we may hatch some idea of our own, scribble it down, develop, review and make decisions about it. And we know that eventually we can take this work to someone who will commit to helping us deliver it to the reader, and that that reader, sitting alone somewhere, will nod slightly and understand.

The Editorial Team