Alice Munro and her Editing Team

Known for her spare and powerful prose, it’s a little difficult to imagine anyone editing Alice Munro at all. But according to an article in Quill & Quire, though Munro’s work doesn’t undergo a great deal of editing, there is more than one editor involved.

Munro doesn’t build sentences by accretion in the manner of verbose writers like Norman Mailer or Salman Rushdie – she works by paring away, by deciding what words not to use.

And yet Munro has not one, not even two, but three editors, all of whom have a hand in guiding her work: Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories first see the light of day; Douglas Gibson at McClelland & Stewart, who has been Munro’s Canadian editor since her 1978 collection, Who Do You Think You Are?; and Anne Close at Knopf, her long-time U.S. publisher.

The full piece is here. Munro’s most recent novel, Dear Life, came out in mid-October.