Novelist Recalls Life as an Editor

When novelist Gwyneth Cravens served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker in the mid-’80s, she worked with such literary lights as Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, Deborah Eisenberg, Bruce McCall, Tama Janowitz and dozens of other writers of similar wattage.

“It was just wonderful to work there,” said Cravens, a visiting writer at UC Irvine this quarter. “And it was interesting to work with different kinds of writers with different styles. I can’t think of anything more different than Milan Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”) and Tama Janowitz (“Slaves of New York”), but it was very rewarding.”

How much editing each author needed varied, Cravens said. “One author will turn in a completely perfect story: You don’t have to change one comma. Another author will turn in something that needs work: You send it back and say, ‘Please rewrite this.’ You work with them. The New Yorker was sort of known for that, that between copy editing and the editing, the author could improve the story.”

As a Visiting Writer at UCI, Cravens is teaching a writing workshop for students in the graduate writing program. She also is teaching an undergraduate English literature course in the short story. “It’s time-consuming,” she says, “but I find it stimulating to my own writing.”

Cravens, who is renting a house in Laguna Beach, holds her campus office hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She’s finding, however, that the office hours often run into overtime as a steady stream of graduate students stop by to discuss their writing.

“I’m trying to find out what they want from me,” she said. “That is, what can I say or suggest or do for them that will help their writing. They’re probably more interested in how to get published, but I’m more interested in how they can be good writers because you can be a wonderful writer and not necessarily get published.

“You know, Kafka published almost nothing during his life. No one saw any of Van Gogh’s paintings while he was alive, but he must have gotten some satisfaction out of his work. If I could teach one thing, it would be how to live as a writer and be happy in your vocation as a writer no matter what the fate of your work is.”

When Cravens moved to New York from New Mexico in 1965 to attend New York University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, she thought she’d wind up an English professor. But while working on her master’s degree in literature, she began meeting the writers and poets living in Greenwich Village. Although she had ambitions of one day becoming a writer, she said, they were “secret ambitions.”

“At the time, it was odd for a woman to think about being a writer,” she said. “Even from my background, to think about being an English professor was quite a leap. So I secretly wanted to be a writer and secretly admired Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and other women writers, but I was too shy to really describe myself a writer. But I wrote all the time, and I began to meet these other writers and I thought, ‘well, you could write, you could get published and so on,’ and I began to write and get published.”

She began selling articles to Mademoiselle magazine, and in 1966, a few months after earning her master’s degree, she landed a job as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker.

Cravens, who was married at the time, left The New Yorker after a year to indulge in a typically ‘60s fantasy: Using their savings, she and her husband “dropped out” to go live and write in Europe.

They lived in Spain and Germany for a year until their money ran out. During that time, Cravens gave birth to a daughter, Dovie. When they returned to New York, she got her old job back at The New Yorker.

Wanting to be more active as a writer, she left The New Yorker in 1971 and got a job writing and editing for Seventeen magazine. “It was a woman’s magazine with all the limitations that implies,” she said. “By then, I was publishing articles in Harper’s and I was invited to be an editor at Harper’s, and I wound up doing a lot of writing for them.”

Cravens became an associate editor there, but left in 1974 to write full time. Teaming up with Dr. John Marr, director of the New York City Bureau of Infectious Disease Control, she co-wrote a thriller, “Black Death.” That was followed by another thriller, “Speed of Light.”

“The thrillers were my ticket to freedom,” she said. “They financed my being able to stay home and write more serious kinds of fiction, which was what I had always had my eye on doing and had done for some little magazines and literary anthologies. The thrillers were very good training in plot and pacing, and I just learned a lot about the mechanics of novel writing.”

In 1983, a year after her third book, “Love and Work,” was published, Cravens was invited to become a fiction editor at The New Yorker. And there she remained for 4 1/2 years until the magazine’s legendary editor William Shawn was fired by Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., who had bought the magazine.

“One of the reasons I had decided to go back to work was I wanted the privilege of working with Mr. Shawn, who was just one of the most remarkable people I have ever met,” said Cravens, who also contributed fiction and nonfiction to the magazine. “It was the most wonderful place to work, just idyllic.”

But it just wasn’t the same after Shawn left, and 2 months later, Cravens left the magazine to devote all of her time to novel writing.

While acknowledging that a writer can write anywhere, Cravens finds living in New York particularly conducive to being a writer.

“For me, it was because to be around other people who are doing what you are doing--and to be able to talk shop--is very exciting,” she said.

As she sees it, a university writing program is a way of creating a similar literary environment.

“Writing is such a lonely, isolated business that to just meet with other people and discuss (that) you might be having the same problems, or having the same confusion about something, you can really help each other. Or, if you get a rejection and feel like it’s the end of the world, and someone else says, ‘No, no, I got 10 rejections from that editor before I got accepted.’ It’s just a way of keeping yourself going, and it can be a very supportive atmosphere.”

Despite her teaching schedule, reading student manuscripts and holding extended office hours to talk to her students, Cravens has found that her stint at UCI has not really cut into her own writing schedule.

At the end of the winter quarter, Cravens will return to New York, where she has lived the past 14 years with humor writer Henry Beard, co-founder of the National Lampoon.

Beyond completing her novel, however, she has no long-range plans.