Three books, one secret weapon
Martha Kanya-Forstner has achieved the feat of editing three of the season’s biggest prize winners
Behind every award-winning author is a silent partner, an editor who polishes a rough diamond into a literary gem.
Martha Kanya-Forstner of Penguin Random House — though her official title is editor-in-chief of both Doubleday Canada and McClelland & Stewart — has the rare distinction of being the editor behind three of the season’s biggest prizewinning books.
They include: Michael Redhill’s “Bellevue Square,” which won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize; David Chariandy’s novel “Brother,” which won the $50,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and James Maskalyk’s “Life on the Ground Floor,” winner of the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
“There’s no rawer time in an author’s life than when you’re going through the final stages of editing,” says Redhill. “I think a great editor is part therapist, part technician and part confessor.”
When a writer hands over their manuscript, he says, “You’re certainly giving your editor something that you think is pretty close to being finished. But it’s still pretty damp and the wings are folded up.” It takes a good editor to “bring you from the place where you think you’re finished to where you’re actually finished.
“I have a great editor and anybody who Martha works with has a great editor,” Redhill added.
Bringing “Brother” from conception to completion was a long journey for Chariandy, who began working on it in 2007 before undertaking a collaboration with Kanya-Forstner that took four years.
“The way Martha puts it — and Martha is always profoundly modest about her extraordinary gifts — she says the best things an editor can do is listen and ask the right questions,” Chariandy says.
“I felt that Martha was there with me on each and every page, with each and every sentence, in fact, and in recognizing the novel I wanted to write and simply helping me in really concrete ways to achieving that goal.”
Maskalyk said he believes Kanya-Forstner’s main skill is to act as a surrogate for the reader.
“What an editor does is she works with you ... to make sure that you have achieved your goal of reaching the reader. She stands in for the thousands of people who are going to follow,” Maskalyk says.
“She doesn’t rewrite; she offers areas in which you can grow in your ability to capture the readers’ imagination or speak to their heart.”
Kanya-Forstner, who has worked in the publishing industry for 20 years — starting out as an unpaid intern — said all three books, two fiction and one nonfiction, posed very specific challenges.
“Each book is very different, so part of the job is figuring out what the author’s intentions are very specifically for that book so that, at the end, the author can look at the book and say, ‘This comes as close as I can imagine it coming to what I had intended it to be,’” Kanya Forstner says.
“I would never impose my vision of a book onto an author. But if the author has been good enough and generous enough to share what his intention is, then I’m not going to stop until that’s been realized,” she said.
“I think I would be doing such a disservice if I pretended we got there and we actually hadn’t.”
Kanya-Forstner, a mother of three daughters ages 8 to 15, receives no bonus for overseeing award-winning books though she gets plenty of appreciation from the successful authors.
But a book editor doesn’t always offer just a sympathetic shoulder.
“Martha was born to be an editor because she’s easygoing, very personable, but she has an iron fist in a velvet glove,” said Redhill with a laugh.
Kanya-Forstner was particularly adept at letting Maskalyk know when his words were getting in the way of telling the story.
“Even if there’s a favourite piece of writing and I think I’ve done a really tricky thing, and it rhymes and it looks beautiful and it sounds sweet, she’ll say, ‘Stuff like that gets in the way’ and then you say, ‘OK,’” Maskalyk said.
“Often the editorial position is a silent one, but (Kanya-Forstner) does such a beautiful job of helping us capture the essence of what we’re trying to get across and she’s kind of merciless in that way of saying, ‘You can do better.’”
Chariandy said that too often, book editors like Kanya-Forstner don’t get the recognition they deserve.
“Within the publishing world, there are people who are perform a lot of profoundly intelligent and hard labour, and I certainly feel that editors do that,” Chariandy said.
“They are the unsung heroes of the world of books (and) they’re oftentimes women working within the publishing industry.”
Kanya-Forstner edited a total of 10 books in 2017, though the process for some books — as in the case of “Brother” — can take several years. Once a manuscript is finalized, she reads the work again three more times.
She has worked with some of the country’s most celebrated authors, including Wayson Choy, Michael Crummey, Camilla Gibb, Kyo Maclear, Nino Ricci and M.G. Vassanji.
The job of book editing has become even more challenging in the digital age, Kanya-Forstner noted.
“It’s very hard in a world where there are 10,000 things competing for people’s attention. I think we compete with Netflix as much as we compete with Harper Collins,” she said.
“I think it’s just a very busy and noisy world and reading — in particular the kinds of books that I work on — are about a much quieter pleasure, and I hope a deeper and ultimately more lasting and satisfying pleasure,” she added.
Book awards do a fine job of drawing public attention to works that Canadians ought to be proud of.
“I would hope (the prizes) shine that spotlight on how exceptional Canadian writing is. I would hope that in reading (these three books), people would think, ‘Look at what’s going on in Canadian fiction and look at what extraordinary writers we have,’ and then maybe they’ll go out and discover another one,” she added.