One Audacious Résumé

How an Undiagnosed Autistic Person Stumbled into a Life of Editing

A guest essay by Priscilla Stuckey | Read more at Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a Living World.

“You sent us a résumé for copyediting, and I’m looking at it now. I see you made three mistakes.”

Heat flooded my neck, my face, my eyes while she pointed out each one, ending with the hyphen after the word carefully. “But we really like your academic background,” she added. “I think I’ll go ahead and send you a copyediting test, just to see what you do with it.”

She was the production manager at Harper & Row, San Francisco (now HarperOne), the person who coordinates design, copyediting, and proofs for each book. Her office was the arm of Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) that publishes all their books on religion and spirituality. I was a master’s student at the Graduate Theological Union across the bay in Berkeley. She was right; I was well suited to their list.

The test arrived in a small manila envelope with pages folded in half inside. Forty years later, I can still see the back of that envelope, can feel how my heart pounded when I bent the metal clip up and lifted the flap. The cover letter said to please make the text conform to Chicago Manual of Style. She would review my work when I was done.

An Utter Blank

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t a copyeditor. A year or so before, I’d helped a professor correct the page proofs of his book, and it was true that I could often catch typos, but I had no editorial training, had taken barely an English class in college, and had never, before that time, held a Chicago Manual of Style in my hands. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of it.

But moving to Berkeley with my husband and enrolling in seminary had drained our finances, and I really needed a job. I was twenty-seven years old, and I had no idea how to find one. I knew the mayhem of a restaurant was not for me; same with retail. Why were there so many jobs I couldn’t make myself do? It would be decades before I learned that I was autistic, with social and sensory thresholds much lower than most other people’s, and that unemployment rates for autistic people hover in the stratosphere. All I knew at the time was that the thought of finding a job sent me into cold sweats.

No one else seemed frightened of the work world—what was wrong with me? I’d been asking this question for years already. Just after college, watching my friends march off to teaching jobs I already knew I couldn’t handle, I’d felt bewildered at the utter blank of my own future. Finally, thinking for sure I could pay rent by filing papers in an office, I’d pulled on my best skirt and tried the local temp agency. The woman across the desk had leaned forward to peer down at my sensible shoes, looked up at me like I’d just dragged a muddy dog across her white carpet, and let me know we were done.

But now I was desperate. After listing the usual options and crossing each one out, I admitted with a grimace that the only thing I knew was books. But how to make a living with books? I recalled working with the professor—so satisfying to find and correct each typo! And I did get paid for it. So I drew up a résumé saying I was a copyeditor and listing my thin experience (um, it was actually in proofreading not copyediting). I researched the dozens of publishers in the Bay Area and mailed my résumé to each one. It’s a miracle I heard from any of them. Harper was the only one.

How, Again, Do You Mark Up a Page?

With trembling fingers I opened the envelope and pulled out the pages—double-spaced text, photocopied crooked.

The thing was a mess. An unartful writer had plunked down vague thoughts next to each other with little to connect them, like ungainly beads strung willy-nilly on a frayed and fragile thread. I skimmed the paragraphs, then skimmed them again. Where to even begin?

So I headed to the GTU library, pulled the Chicago Manual of Style from the reference shelves, and monopolized it for the next week. Paging through it, I felt almost instantly overwhelmed. I had no idea there was so much to know! Hyphens and en-dashes and em-dashes and when to use them (no hyphen after an -ly adverb); funny capitalization rules; usage guides for commonly mistaken words. Then there was the half of the book devoted to footnotes and bibliographies—no way could I absorb all this! I cut my book study short and turned to the test. I made a copy of it to practice on and with sweating hands got to work.

I disassembled paragraphs and put them back together a different way, trying to imagine what the writer intended to say. I learned markup symbols, poring over the page of handwritten examples in Chicago. On scrap paper I practiced the delete mark: a straight line through text, then a sharp corner up, ending in a little loop. A caret between words to insert text, then printing the extra words neatly above the line. On my practice pages—more and more of them piling up—I tried fresh ways of rewording. Finally, after a week of working full-time on the test, I printed out a new copy and transferred my marks in pen. And then mailed the pages in, fearing the worst.

The production manager called soon after. “I’m looking at your test. You really dug into the paragraphs. It’s fine what you did. I actually like it. I’ll keep it here, and if we need someone we’ll be in touch.”

What’s Coding?

A full year went by. Now it was May 1985, and I was finishing my thesis, written on our new Apple II computer with 5.25-inch floppy disks. The final copy of the thesis was due in the library in one week. I had just started printing it out when the phone rang.

“Hi, my name is Dorian, and I’m the new production manager at Harper & Row in San Francisco. I went through my predecessor’s files, and I found your copyediting test. It looks great—I don’t know why she didn’t hire you! Anyway, I’m in kind of an emergency. I have a book here, and I need it copyedited in a week. Can you do it?”

I stammered my dilemma: thesis due at the same time, crazy end of semester. But I wanted this work, needed it badly, so sure, why not?

“I can see you don’t have much experience coding,” Dorian added.

I paused. “Coding?”

“You know, marking the titles and levels of subheads. But I can help you with that.”

She overnighted the manuscript, and I spent hours of the following week on the phone with her while she taught me about A-heads and B-heads and the codes Harper used for titles and block texts. I marked them on the paper with the colored pencils she asked me to use—blue, green, anything but red. She answered all my questions about author queries—when to write them, how much detail to go into. “Keep them brief and friendly,” she advised. “When you identify a problem, it’s always good to offer a way to fix it—as a suggestion only.” She told me where to buy the pastel pink and green and yellow query slips with gummed edges that I would write my queries on, licking the edges to stick them onto the manuscript pages. (The new removable Post-It Notes just didn’t stay put.) At the end of a week, after long days of bearing down in adrenaline-fueled concentration and short nights of sleep, I finished the book. I overnighted it back in the prepaid envelope.

Me, Tactful?

That first job turned into a steady gig. Soon I was doing a book a month for Harper, and Dorian, who lived in Berkeley, had turned into a friend. Copyediting fit well into my student schedule. After my master’s I entered a doctoral program at the GTU and settled into a routine: working on academic research for two or three weeks then editing for the next few.

It did take some time to learn the art of author queries. I couldn’t bear it when authors were casually sexist or racist, but I learned to phrase my queries with polite restraint: “Some readers could interpret you as saying . . . Maybe rephrase to include everyone?” I became known in the office as the copyeditor who thought she knew more than the author—but I was a doctoral student after all, in the very field, religious studies, that informed each of the books. It was nevertheless my job to phrase each query so graciously that the author could only agree with it. I didn’t always succeed. Now and then I heard that the editor of a book I had worked on ripped one of my queries off the page to save the author from seeing it.

I practiced phrasing my queries in the voice of one who knew less than the author (did autistic masking help with this?), and I let go of the results, allowing the author to bear the responsibility for the book.

I found that skillful editing depended on being able to imagine the world from the author’s point of view. Many editors talk about “getting inside the author’s head,” and I seemed to have a knack for it. (Did all those years of practicing how-to-be in a neurotypical world make this easier?) By the time I was halfway into a manuscript, I could rephrase awkward sentences with ease, and my suggested edits borrowed the tones of the author’s voice. I plowed into each manuscript as if moving right into the author’s internal world, seeing it from the inside out. (Was it autistic hyperempathy?)

I Just Want to Work There

Though freelance work suited my student schedule, it was socially isolating, especially now that I was divorced and living alone in Oakland. I missed out on the companionship of the office, the social glue of it. A few of the Harper staff had become in-person friends, so I often heard about office doings. Every party they had roused my envy. Why couldn’t I just work there?

One week I got called in to the office for a short-term project that needed an extra pair of eyes, and I jumped at the chance to spend the days with my friends. On Monday morning I boarded a bus downtown to the BART station and rode the whirring, rumbling train under the bay. On the other end I caught a clacking Metro rail car out to the neighborhood of the office and walked the last three blocks on a sidewalk adjacent to blaring car horns and roaring buses. I’d been getting around on public transportation for years with no problem. Still, those streets were loud, and arriving at the door of the building felt like relief. I stepped into the quiet office and got to work.

Being there was just as fun as I’d imagined. I loved seeing my friends. People I’d only talked with on the phone welcomed me warmly. I felt the camaraderie of working next to others, like an invisible net was lifting us all up together and ferrying us across the hours. When someone paused at my chair to say hi or share an in-joke, I thrilled to be included. There was no question: I belonged here.

Yet as the week passed I found my mood sinking for no apparent reason. What sadness was dogging me as I left the house each morning, growing more intense every day? By Friday, on that last block from the Metro to the office, I found myself fully sobbing. At the door of the building I pulled myself together and walked in, then spent the day wondering what could possibly be wrong.

The following week, working again from home, I found my mood brightening, again for no reason. Only then did I piece it together: I was hypersensitive to the noise. A trip across town on public transportation might be fine once in a while, but doing it every day would do me in. I might crave the camaraderie, but bathing in it continuously was not something I was built for.

I resigned myself, again, to working alone. At home I could enjoy the warm filtered sun of my woodsy apartment, the twittering of birds, the peace of being utterly by myself.

And I would continue to be mindful of the loneliness that came with it.

Becoming Real

I worked steadily through the nineties—along with writing my dissertation—on what turned out to be a decade of visionary books. I copyedited works by well-known feminist Pagans and Buddhist teachers and Jewish and Christian feminist theologians; books by famous poets and writers and self-help authors; books by science writers and religious historians. I delighted in three years running of the Best Spiritual Writing series. A few books turned into favorites: Enduring Grace, by Carol Flinders, about medieval women mystics close to my heart; The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd (before she became known for The Secret Life of Bees); and my all-time favorite, The Essential Rumi, by Coleman Barks. With each assignment I pinched myself, hardly able to believe it: I was getting paid to read this book!

And over the years, thank-you notes from authors piled up. The first one I pulled from the mailbox stunned me: an author actually asked the Harper office for my home address and wrote me a card, by hand, full of glowing thanks! I kept that card for years. After editing turned digital in the early nineties, in-house editors forwarded emails brimming with gratitude: “I don’t know when I’ve ever had such gentle, supportive editing.” “Your graceful touch has clarified meaning everywhere! Thanks!” “You have enhanced the book immeasurably. We love you.”

I may have felt isolated, but feedback from authors assured me that we were indeed connected. They felt seen and heard by me in that most tender and personal place—their own writing—and they returned the gift in their thanks. Their acknowledgment helped me too feel more real.

So Much Crossing Out—So, So Much

The spring I defended my dissertation and finally graduated at the age of forty, my editing career opened into developmental work. It was a graceful turn that life engineered with no help from me—pure gift. An agent and a publisher, both from New York, each had a manuscript in need of big help. The agent had taken on a book of almost 1200 pages full of musings on spiritual psychology, and to have even a chance of selling it he needed it cut to 350. The publisher was working with a West African teacher whose book on village spirituality needed a firm organizing hand. Both projects would involve, for the first time, working directly with the author.

The spiritual psychology author turned out to be reluctant to say goodbye to his favorite lines—and all of them were favorites. Now those long years I’d spent developing a gracious tone paid off as I wrote him detailed edit memos and chatted with him on the phone. We didn’t get the book quite down to target size, but over six months we did get it down to 450, and the manuscript did get sold and published, and the author did appear on Oprah.

But the real payoff came in the letter of thanks he sent at the end: “Anybody who could take a manuscript of mine that’s 1186 pages long and edit out about 60% of it without me, Mister Attachment, feeling much pain is a damn genius.”

Born for This

The West African author was Malidoma Somé, whom I already knew from attending a workshop that he and his then-wife, Sobonfu, had led. Their village in Burkina Faso had commissioned them to come to the West and teach village values here—to help Western people cool our frantic, burning hearts and to heal our separation from nature and each other. This book would draw all of Malidoma’s teachings into a coherent message.

I skimmed the pages, catching a glimmer of the message. Big parts of internal logic were missing, but I could draw those missing pieces out of him. Sections were disjointed and thoughts overlapped, but I could identify the main ideas and tease them apart into new chapters. I could find a through-line. I could write transitions. It was like an enormous puzzle—the best kind—and all I needed to do was help each piece find its place. Now that the big-picture, systematic-thinking part of my mind was no longer tied up in my dissertation, I had plenty of mental room for someone else’s cosmos. I dug in to the work with relish.

As I worked I slipped easily into the Dagara people’s worldview as portrayed by Malidoma. I could almost hear his ancestors whispering in my ear. Every change I made seemed perfectly aimed. Organizing the book was hard mental work, yes, but it was throwing open doors inside my heart—doors of hope that the world could actually be different. We could in fact live by better values. People in other parts of the world were already modeling their societies after the complex interdependencies of Earth, and as Indigenous people, they’d been doing this for centuries. The book started answering questions I didn’t even know I was asking, questions I would explore in my own writing in years to come. In the final step of editing, I suggested a new title: The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community.

When I attended Malidoma’s local reading, I was moved to tears with a feeling of perfect fit between what this project had needed and what I had brought to it. I had been born for this.

One-on-One

Through the 2000s my development editing work expanded with little marketing effort from me, thanks to a well-known author who so loved how I had copyedited her memoir that she trumpeted my name for years to every one of her students who asked her where to find help writing their own books. I worked one-on-one with dozens of authors, coaching them through their projects in weekly or monthly or once-in-a-while meetings, cheering with them when their books launched into the world.

The one-on-one style of work extended to my academic career as well, where I mentored master’s and doctoral students in low-residency programs, conferring by phone and email then gathering in person on campus a few times a year. This learning model did not even exist when I entered grad school, but now the world had shifted. I could use my skills in ways that emphasized my strengths and made room for my limitations. Coaching authors and mentoring students connected me to people in real time, and the social isolation problem of my career was finally solved—especially after I found the love of my life and we joined together under one roof.

I still copyedited books, though fewer of them. By the time I finished my last one, the list stood at 225 books completed for Harper alone and dozens more for other publishers.

Ten Thousand Hours

Devoting word-by-word attention to hundreds of other people’s books prepared me better than I could have imagined for my current stage of work: writing my own books. To this day I love each side of the writing desk with equal passion: the generative side of getting the words out in a first draft, the editing side of juggling the words and playing with each paragraph until it sings. I do both jobs at the same time, adding new lines to the end of a piece then returning to the beginning to read all the way through and fiddle as I go.

Those ten thousand hours I spent on other people’s books were the training I needed to revise my own work in the most efficient and supportive way possible. They seasoned me as a writer—ten thousand hours of writing practice, and I got paid for every one of them.

A Satisfying Shape

When I was a child and people asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never had an answer. In our small farming community in the sixties, the usual options for bookish kids were teacher, doctor, and nurse, and since I was a girl, only two of them applied. I loved reading, but the idea of making a living with books lay far beyond the horizon of the known world, unimaginable. All through college I just followed what I enjoyed, and it always involved learning and books.

So I feel an immense gratitude that this autistic bookish kid found a way to fit into the work world. Life has been unswervingly generous; it led me toward and then through a career that I never could have dreamed up on my own.

Some lines from Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” come to mind:

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

I know that cry of the heart, that yearning to be of use. In my twenties I searched for water to carry, fearing that my pitcher would forever be empty. But in the end all I had to do was keep following what I enjoyed most—and when I got desperate, to write up one audacious résumé.

Today the angst of those early years is softened by all the decades that followed of feeling full with satisfaction—full with the joy of being handed, over and over, the projects that needed my particular skills, the water that required the pitcher I was bringing.

All along, it seems, the water that wanted to be carried was finding me.

Priscilla Stuckey is still devouring books, though she rarely edits them anymore. She became a first-time author in her 50s, when her book Kissed by a Fox: And Other Stories of Friendship in Nature (Counterpoint, 2012) won the WILLA Award in Creative Nonfiction. Opening each chapter with a life-changing encounter with a birch tree or a bald eagle or a creek, she delves into what it might look like to share a different cultural story of nature, centered on love and connection. Her second book, Tamed by a Bear: Coming Home to Nature-Spirit-Self (Counterpoint, 2017), is an intimate look at the first year after she took up the nature-connecting practice of spirit (or shamanic) journeys. She writes the Substack Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a Living World. Priscilla learned she is autistic at the age of 64.