Alan Contreras on Editing

Shortened link: bit.ly/Contreras-editing

Transcribed from a recording made at the Springfield/Eugene-area Editors (SEE) monthly lunch hour, December 11, 2018. The discussion is mainly regarding Birds of Oregon (Oregon State University Press, 2003) and Edge of Awe (OSU Press, 2019). It picks up shortly after the introduction by SEE founder Sherri Schultz. Transcribed by Hendrik Herlyn with adjustments for clarity by Alan and light copyediting by Sherri.

... [one complexity occurred] when two of the writers died during the project, because somebody then had to pick up the work at an unknown point, working with whatever material they had, and my recollection is they were both in pretty good shape. But when you’re working with 100 writers, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.

Working with a scientific writer — some of these people were OSU professors, people from Fish and Wildlife — they had worked with the subject matter for years and years and years. But they had worked with it so long they had become specialized. We had situations in which somebody who was an absolute expert on the breeding habitat and distribution of a particular bird — I mean, really really good, their work was fabulous — and then you read the section about migration and winter, and you discover they were completely clueless. They didn’t know the bird migrated at all. Really.

The first time I read one of those, it was by somebody I knew. Fortunately, she’s a very professional person, and when I said, “Here’s some sources you might check on this … here are some sources you may not have access to that are blah blah blah,” she said, “Oh!” That was fine. Once she got past “Oh!,” she did fabulous work. But that’s kinda what happens when somebody who is a professional in a particular field is actually only a professional in 80% of that field or 30% of that field and simply doesn’t know the rest.

The other issue is that a fair number of people with scientific training are not very good writers. They’re very good writers in the context of what they normally do. Birds of Oregon was kind of an odd thing, because it was designed to be useful to both a lay audience and a professional audience, and I think we managed that. I’m very, very pleased with the results of it, and we sold 2,300 copies in hardcover at 60 bucks a copy. So I can live with that. And the paperback — it still sells today, you know, almost 15 years downstream. So, a good project.

Just some thoughts about working with a whole collection of writers with different backgrounds. One of the best writers was a grade school teacher from Klamath Falls. He wrote some grebe accounts and some other things. I think one of the reasons he did so well is that he was scared shitless: “What am I doing in this project? Aaah, I’m up to here!” That “scared shitless” is technical language (laughter). He knew that he was kind of clueless in the sense of having to research new things, but he turned out to be a really good, dedicated researcher. He came up and spent days at OSU, going through all the material he couldn’t get in Klamath Falls in 1999, and produced some very good accounts that needed almost no editing. So you just never know what you’re gonna get.

I think I’ll move on from Birds of Oregon at this point [returning to it later] and talk about Edge of Awe, another OSU Press book, which is coming out in May. [That is,] I think it’s coming out in May — I thought I was getting the first group of proofs last week, but we’ll see. This was a totally different experience for me, and I don’t know that I want to ever do something quite like this again. This wasn’t like cat-herding scientists, because they knew they weren’t the editor; this was cat-herding writers. (Many heads nod; a few moans.) Aaah, OK, you get that. So, a very different situation.

Now, some of the [writers are historians]; some of the stuff in Edge of Awe goes back to the 1880s. But some of it was written by — well, let’s see. Sean Burns was a senior at Siuslaw High School in Florence when he wrote his piece in here, and his piece is on the ... he participates ... he’s a birder, a very fine one, but he also attends a Steens Mountain running camp. So he did a little dual piece there. Thomas Meinzen is from Eugene; he’s a student at Whitman College. I picked him because I knew he’d been a Malheur Refuge intern during his second year of college. So it’s a very different kind of experience, and one you guys are probably much more familiar with. People who are accustomed to writing — they know their stuff is great, and sometimes it is (audience laughing), and fortunately I was able to pass a couple of things around, when I actually had some doubts about a particular item ...

(Unintelligible question/comment from the audience)

Thank you very much. So in this situation, the other issue was [stylistic changes]. There’s an extract in here from Dallas Lore Sharp’s book on Oregon, which came out in 1917, I think. There’s also an extract from Charles Bendire’s military field journals of 1880, when he was the doctor at Camp Harney north of Burns.

One big issue that raises is, you’re kinda stuck with stylistic differences that you can only do so much about. And I decided early on [that] it is what it is, that there’s nothing wrong with stylistic differences in this kind of collection, which is basically a collection of people’s individual experiences in visiting the Malheur–Steens Mountain region. So when you see the final book, you will see a tremendous variety of style and ... is it too much variety? Time will tell. We left a lot of things alone. The grammatical issues are sort of dealt with, but there is a lot of difference between a military doctor’s journal and an 18-year-old distance runner’s recollections of Steens Mountain.

I think we’re OK. I think it’s going to do very well; it’s a very popular topic. We’ve had two pieces of extraordinary good luck with it. One is that since I’ve known Ursula Le Guin for a long time, I asked if we could reprint her line art from her book Out Here, which is the book she did with Roger Dorband on Steens Mountain. And a lot of people don’t know she’s a fabulous sketch artist. So she said yes, and I offered her, since I paid all the writers more or less out of my own pocket by way of a donation to Friends of Malheur, I said, “Well, I can offer you 300 bucks for your artwork and three or four poems.” And she said fine, no problem, and when I told her that all of the royalties of the book are going to the Friends of Malheur for their trail maintenance and everything like that, she said, “Don’t pay me; I want my check to go to Friends of Malheur with the minimum amount of fuss.”

If any of you have ever met her or even read her stuff, minimum amount of fuss, that’s the way it is. So that’s what we did. And then, before she could sign the final agreement, she passed away. So we had emails describing what we’re gonna do, and her son Theo said, “That’s great, and we will make sure this happens, and I will instruct her agent that this is going to happen.” So that was wonderful.

The other piece of luck that you could have never guessed at is that one of the people on the OSU Press board, their sort of advisory board for the press, is a friend of William Kittredge, the nature author from Montana, who wrote Hole in the Sky and some other very famous things. So she called him up and said, “Would you be willing to do a preface for Edge of Awe?” and he said sure.... So we got those unexpected possibilities, and that’s turned out to be very good.

We also got hold of Kim Stafford, William Stafford’s son, and said we’d like to use some of his dad’s work I like very much. He has a couple of great Malheur poems, [so] we wanted to use one. Kim said we’d have to go through his agency; the estate’s agency does that. They charged us nothing, partly because the book is a fundraiser for Friends of Malheur — it’s not a fundraiser for Big Al. ... It was a very difficult project because of so many different moving parts that didn’t have things in common with each other. People sort of changing their mind about what they wanted to do. Working with estates ... just lots and lots of different things going on here.

So I think I’ll stop now, and I’d be happy to answer any questions about any of these ...

Audience: (Inquiry about what in Contreras’s background helped him manage conflicts with authors)

I was a lobbyist for many years. I represented the Oregon community colleges, and then for a couple of years I worked with the U of O public relations office. And I was raised in Quaker meetings, and that helps. I told Sherri I was a fallen Quaker (audience laughter) ... well, “lapsed” and “fallen” are two different things; we can talk about this.

Audience: (Inquiry about how Contreras gets editing work)

Alan: I’ve had a couple of oddball little proofing or editing things show up over the years. I’m not a professional editor and I’m not looking for work, but it’s kind of a trade-off. Your friends figure out that you do this kind of thing, so you get requests, and you figure out how to manage those kind of one at a time. At least, I do. I also have a small imprint that I run through Amazon and do some reprints of out-of-print things that I think are worth getting back into print. I volunteered to do a friend’s memoir, and it’s needed a lot more editing than I thought it would. Only some of that is really gonna happen, so we’ll see on that ... it’s a great memoir, but ... but we’ll see.

Questions, thoughts, comments?

Audience: I’m curious about how long [Edge of Awe] took, from inception to birth.

Alan: Too long. Longer than I expected. I began sorting out what I wanted to do with it, and I first talked to Mary Braun at OSU Press in April 2017, and a lot of ... let me think here ... work just trickled in. Some ... a fair chunk of it was done by the fall, September 2017 — probably two thirds of it, maybe more. There were two special situations with Edge of Awe that concerned us, that OSU and I talked about and tried to deal with. One is, we had no one who was a local rancher in that area writing at all. And we had no one from the Paiute tribe writing at all. So we held the book up for a while to try to sell especially the Paiute folk ...

Audience: Did you get somebody?

Alan: Well, let me tell you how that worked. That was very interesting. Chas Biederman is from Burns, though he’s now living ... he’s a farrier, he lives in Clackamas County and shoes horses ... (audience: Really?) ... yes, a real one. He was recommended to me by somebody, you know; by then I was sort of grasping around — “What can we do?” — and somebody said, “Well, I know this guy named Chas Biederman.” Well, he wrote just a wonderful piece on what it was like to try to get a mule train off of Steens Mountain in the dark. And the answer is, it was a disaster. But it’s a very well-written piece, and it’s a lot of fun. So that got me to a comfort level on the question of whether I had a local person’s writing in there at all. His family still lives in Burns.

The Paiute problem, we thought, was much more serious, I did not want to do the book without something in there, because otherwise I had only the old military doctor from the 1880s, and that didn’t sit well with me. So I and the press people, we tried many, many different ways to get a response from the tribe at all — and we got nothing. There was no response to any attempt to contact anyone through any method, even through local people. And finally someone suggested that I talk to Peter Walker at the U of O, who had been working on a book for two or three years on the ... well, he had been working with the tribe on something else, and then he ended up over there constantly, basically taking notes on the Bundy infestation. And he was doing a book for OSU Press called Sagebrush Collaboration, which just came out two months ago. And it’s a superb piece on it, but he knew all of the tribal people, and over the years they had been willing to speak with him.

So we asked him, ”Would you speak with one of your contacts and find out (a) if there’s a problem that we need to know about, a communication problem that we didn’t handle right that we need to know about, and (b) are they gonna do anything?” Whatever they wanted to do was fine with me. And the word we got back is that the tribe goes through periodic blocks of time in which there is no external communication. And the Burns Paiute tribe is, of all the tribes in the West, the most known for that, and the most serious about it.

And so that dealt with number one and number two. I no longer felt like I’d said something wrong, and I understood I wasn’t gonna get a thing. So we then made Peter an offer he couldn’t refuse. Peter wrote that chapter based on his years of working with the Paiutes, and he wrote about their history in the region from his point of view as a sociologist as best he could. We think it’s OK. I think it’s very good. The alternative was to wait two or three years to see what happens, and there was not a way to do that.

So it’s not perfect; it’s what was possible. You do what you can do, and you don’t do what can’t be done. That’s just what it is. Those were probably the two biggest problems with it, but that’s why, even though most of the material was there well over a year ago, we didn’t have that last piece — Peter’s piece — and we did not have one other, I won’t mention that person’s name, till the end of January 2018. So about ten months [elapsed] from my vision that this ought to be done to the last writer submitting their material. And then after that point ... OSU Press is not blindingly fast, and I don’t think there is a university press that’s blindingly fast, but they’re good; they do a good job on all kinds of things.

I don’t know what they’re going to do with an index for this one. [For] some of the books I have done, we’ve had indexes done, [and] some we have not. I think this is a “not,” probably. I’ll know more about that when they send me the proofs in a week. I don’t want to nag them, because ... you know the answer to that. You only want to be nagged by your conscience; that ought to be enough.

Audience: From an editing perspective, what was your greatest challenge? Having so many authors, was it consistency of format ... working with your own style issues, dealing with language ... ?

Alan: Well, I’m going to talk about both books. Birds of Oregon had a fixed format that they were obligated to use. And there weren’t exactly word limits; there were suggestions. We provided a couple of samples. We had a couple of people who we knew would do it exactly right early on, who turned in their stuff early and it’s great, and we sent those out very early on, saying, “This is what we’re after. Try to do something like this.” Also, we had a length limit for the entire book to look at. We just barely got in with one volume, and there was no way to do two volumes.

We had an enormous subvention on this book. Dave Marshall, the senior editor, was married to the woman who owns Leupold & Stevens optics. She was his high school girlfriend, and you know the rest of the story ... they got back together at age 71.

I will tell you a wonderful story: We were at Dave’s house and he was late, and he came down, and Matt and I are sitting there at the table, and Dave came down with his stuff and he’s not organized, which was unheard of. So we’re kinda waiting and finally he stopped and said, “Guys, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m not really prepared today, and the reason is that I ... ahem ... I spent the night at Georgia’s place.” Dave was a very, very traditional sort of person, and Matt and I were just looking at him and thinking, “We hope you had a great time!” And they later got married and had a dozen really good years together. So he was embarrassed to have to admit that he had spent the night at her house at age 71.

So that book was strongly templated with some samples; there was a box they had to fit into, and then we fiddled with that a little bit as time went by. Edge of Awe was the opposite, and I sort of knew that’s what I was gonna get — 19 different formats from 17 different authors. So that became an issue.

Audience: What about fact-checking? I mean, you’ve got all these names and terms that had to be accurate.

Alan: In Birds of Oregon we were set up for that, partly because the three senior editors knew the subject matter very well — the technical subject matter, and we knew different things really well. So yes, there were things that came up, and I think very few problems ultimately.

Edge of Awe — there’s not a whole lot of facts in it. It’s an essay collection. The problem with the older material was what to do with a whole string of bird names that are no longer in use: leave them alone or change them? I chose to leave them alone. I couldn’t think of a reason to change them because of the nature of the book.

If it were Birds of Oregon, we’d have to change them. Edge of Awe, we don’t. Different audience, different purpose, different everything. So there were some issues. Some of the writers who we thought would have a really good command of the language did not, and for some of them I was going, “Oh my god, when I get this, what’s going to happen,” but they came in in remarkably good shape, and I thought, “Yes, this person can actually write.”

Sometimes it was a question of story; sometimes it was technical. In Birds of Oregon, Dave Marshall wasn’t the world’s greatest writer in term of grammar and even spelling. He was, however, the inventor of the Endangered Species Act and the person who basically created Finley Wildlife Refuge and all this other stuff, and he knew everybody. The great advantage of having someone like that on the project is, there was nobody who dared say no when Dave called them up. They all owed their careers — and he’d gotten so many of them jobs — all the professionals, I mean. When Dave Marshall calls you up and says, “Would you be willing to do this?,” there’s only one possible answer. If I call them up, it’s “nyeh.” That was invaluable, having somewhat like that whose standing in the field, who’s so extraordinary, that you kinda get what you want.

Audience: It seems like, in the case of the second book, the range of author styles and flavors is actually the strength.

Alan: That’s my theory. We will find out what people think. That’s kind of what I wanted to do, and there are two chapters in here that are the high-risk chapters, and that’s because they overlap in material a bit, and they are sort of by the same person. One is an original piece by Dave Marshall that he had published elsewhere, which I’m reprinting. The other is a transcription of a video where he was one of the speakers. That’s my biggest question about the book: whether I screwed up in running both [pieces]. I think it’s OK, partly because I shortened both of them.

All of the people who are in it had passed away by the time I got to the final. Both of the speakers on the video were gone. Both of them were friends of mine, and I had permission from anybody under the sun to do anything I want with it. But some of what they’re talking about was the same experiences and the same period of history at Malheur Refuge. It’s a little different angle.

If any of you ... actually, let me rephrase that, after you all have purchased the book, I’d be very interested in knowing whether you think that worked. That’s my biggest doubt about the book. The differences in style, I think, are going to make the book fun. That overlap in the Dave Marshall/McAllister chapter is the thing I’m a little troubled by.

Audience: ... the transcription is going to be intrinsically different.

Alan: It is, sort of.

Audience: (Inquiry about Kittredge)

Alan: Kittredge didn’t really address the book in his preface. He wrote almost entirely about his own experiences growing up in southeastern Oregon. I’m cool with that. The only part that wasn’t really about that was that he said something about Ursula and her time in southeastern Oregon. People don’t realize that she went out there for close on 40 years and stayed at a ranch near the little crossroads of Diamond. And that’s where all of her sketch art — most of it — came from. It was her retreat space.

When I saw her in June two years ago when we were getting this thing together, she was ... it was the first year they weren’t going to be able to go. ‘Cause she was 87 and Charles was 90, and there was no way ... they couldn’t go, and that was really bothering her. But most of you have read some of Ursula? Who’s read the Earthsea books? Well, some of the scenes and the landform and everything in The Tombs of Atuan is from the south end of the Blitzen Valley, from the Frenchglen area around to Diamond and the lower part of Steens Mountain. She mentions that in one of her essay collections that came out in the last couple of years. But how would you know that? And she was out there for decades. She even taught a couple of writing classes at the Field Station in the ’70s and early ’80s during one of its not-too-decrepit periods.

So ... other questions, thoughts, ideas? Comments?

Audience: I’d like to go back to the multiple-editor thing. If each of us was given the same piece of writing, how many different versions would we come up with? How did you deal with that?

Alan: We kept waiting for it to fail. And it didn’t. Partly, the three of us knew each other reasonably well. Matt Hunter is in his mid-50s today. I first met him when he was 16, as a birder kid from Oakland, Oregon, down by Roseburg, who went out to Malheur on a school trip, and I ran into him at Malheur Headquarters, and we started looking at birds together. When you know somebody your entire life, you’ve figured out how to communicate. And we’ve always communicated well, anyway. It’s been a good thing. Dave is a very laid-back, fact-oriented person, doesn’t get overheated, doesn’t lose his temper, just very calm. So the personal relationships started out really, really good.

There were slight differences in our duties. All three of us saw every species account in there ... yeah ... all 456. It took five years. Almost exactly five years. But when you have a template like that, you know what’s supposed to be in each box. So we were really looking at [whether the writers have] filled this box in a way that makes sense to us, that you can read. The technical editing, nobody cares about — moving the commas around and stuff; there wasn’t a whole lot of that, except with a small number of writers. There were more issues with the professional scientists in terms of clarity of presentation for a lay audience than there were with getting the quotation marks in the right place.

Audience: What did each of you do?

Alan: Matt and I did most of the first-round editing, and we sort of think the same. We tend to look for the same things, but our knowledge base is different. He’s a biologist; he currently teaches at Umpqua Community College. We have a lot of information on habitat in there. I can tell a Douglas-fir from a spruce, and that’s about it. Matt’s a professional forester; his bachelor’s is in forestry. There’s a tremendous amount of information in there on plant types, food types, and things like that. I tended to ignore that stuff because I knew that Matt knew what he was doing, and I didn’t.

I knew more about historic issues and trends, and I’ve always been interested in Oregon history, and then that sort of went on to ornithological history, and that’s the book I’m starting to work on for OSU Press now: a history of Oregon ornithology, of which I’m the editor, and there’s going to be four other writers — we’ll see how that goes. But we had different ways of looking at things, and I know a lot more about winter bird distribution than I do about breeding habitat. Winter bird distribution is my stronger area; breeding habitat is not. Matt and Dave both knew a lot about breeding habitat.

Dave was the endangered species guy. He basically handled all of the things in here that might be in that category — Sage Grouse, things of that nature, Peregrine Falcons— because he’d worked on those things since the 1950s. And he wrote ... he sort of invented some of that stuff ... for birds and other things. So we sort of divvied up, not the accounts but the focus, and we talked about that early on.

I knew more about taxonomy than the other two did, but I knew that I was limited, so we brought in a guy I knew who’d just retired to Oregon, Ralph Browning, so we had a house taxonomist for the project, which no regional bird book or state book has ever had. Ralph grew up in Medford, came back to live there, and he spent 25 years as a bird taxonomist at the Smithsonian. Ralph is also a birder, so he knew how to talk to people who were not taxonomists, and he could explain why he wanted us to handle the Green-winged Teal account by splitting it in two — which we did. And people asked about that, and we said, “Our professional taxonomist advised us to do this, based on his knowledge of the situation.” And now the British and the Dutch, I think, have done the same thing, so we feel like we were on the right track. So it was a difference of focus based on our knowledge base.

Audience: So you feel like each of the accounts has a similar voice.

Alan: Yes. You will see little differences. Our biggest problem child was Matt Hunter himself, when he wrote the Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch account. Dave and I just beat on him and beat on him ... I don’t know how many pages it is; it’s way over limit. It’s like three pages or something. Matt wanted to put in every fact he knew ... there’s a kind of “dingidingidingidingi” ... it’s like a mouse had run through there, leaving things. But at that point, that was at the very end of the project and we felt indulgent, so we let Matt do his thing.

But in general, the voice — we tried to aim for a clear voice and a consistent voice, so that a reader, especially a professional reader, is going to get the same kind of thing organized the same way as they work through it. And you’ll see, it’s more critical in some sections, there’s sections on diet and there’s a section on habitat. Most state bird books don’t have those at all. Especially diet — nobody does diet.

If you look at the Birds of Washington that came out two years later, OSU Press is still trying to sell the original press run; I’m sure I could buy ten of them if I wanted to. But they didn’t put in some things that would be really useful to certain audiences. Now, they probably got it done in two years, too, but we were redoing a book that had been last done in 1940. And the data cutoff for that was 1935. Dave Marshall grew up in Portland; he actually knew the two original authors of Birds of Oregon when he was a kid birder growing up in Portland. So it was a legacy he wanted, to do a new Birds of Oregon. So we weren’t going to throw something out in two years. What’s the point? Not worth it.

I’m talking a lot here. There’s no questions or thoughts or comments?

Audience: I thought I heard you say earlier [that you were not trained in] editing and proofreading, but you ended up doing it anyway, and I wondered how that happened.

Alan: I’ve always been a writer. I was a writer from age five, so I’ve always been producing written things. My mother was a Spanish language teacher, and we always had zillions of books and things around, and I grew up in that kind of atmosphere. And the kid who got me into birding when I was eleven years old here in Eugene was a guy named Sayre Greenfield. His parents were both English professors here, Stan and Thelma Greenfield, and they were my extra family. I was sort of steeped in the world of writing.

Sayre and I started producing a mimeographed newsletter called “The Meadowlark” when we were 12 years old at what was the Condon Grade School — it’s now Agate Hall. And poor Thelma had to go sneak into the English department office to run off copies. So we were writing, and Sayre is so embarrassed to this day, in the very first issue the word “meadowlark” is missing the W. And my mother had saved all of these, a couple of copies of each. So a few years ago I sent Sayre his own complete set, and he said, “Oh my god, evidence.”

So I guess I’ve been around writing and doing writing forever and ever, and it started out just writing about birds and nature-related things, but I’ve done a variety of other ... I do a lot of book reviews; I’m one of the book reviewers for a national magazine called The Gay and Lesbian Review. I do reviews for them; I do other writing- and reading-related projects.

The proofing job at OSU, I fell into by accident, because I have lunch with the staff there now and then, ’cause they’ve done a bunch of books with me and I always give them ideas that they don’t want to do, but they were mumbling one day about not having a regular proofreader available for something, and I said, well, I’d give it a try. That was about twelve years ago. And it pays $300 to $450 a book; the turnaround times tend to be very tight. I charge what I think the length and the work merit: if it’s plain text, not very long, it’s not a big deal. It’s the stuff with a zillion captions — you know all this stuff — zillions of captions, photos, tables. I don’t do anything to the indexes.

On one occasion — and I hope it’ll never happen again — they called me and said, “We have a little problem. We ended up working with copy in which one of our authors had hand-adjusted the footnote numbering in the endnotes. They no longer track with the text. Can you fix this?” And I said, “Sure.” They called me instead of using email and said, “We understand this is not a normal project,” by which they meant they knew the fee would be higher. And it was awful.

Audience: On that note, do you work by the word, the hour, flat rate?

Alan: [For] Birds of Oregon, I earn a royalty. Edge of Awe is pro bono. You know, it’s something I always wanted to do, [and] they were willing to do it. But [for] Birds of Oregon, the three editors were all on royalty.

(Cuts to audience voice and a thank-you to Alan.)