Thinking back, I realize I’ve been an editor of something for more years than I care to count.
I began as a sub-editor of my junior high school newspaper. At the time, editing held no special appeal for me; it was something I had to do if I wanted to get my poems published. A few years later I served as editor of my high school newspaper. By that time I had given up poetry and had turned, tentatively, to prose. At the university I had no chance to join the staff of the school paper because that publication was a wholly-owned subsidiary of a goofy ideology. Being entrepreneurial (or maybe just contrarian), I started my own paper. This was during the era of “campus troubles.” The paper was called Dimension and was the first “alternative” newspaper on a college campus. It outlived my stay at the university by about a year, by which time I was in law school, where I did some editing for the law review and witnessed the disutility of an overabundance of footnotes.
While engaged in legal studies I took a part-time job with an educational foundation, for which I founded and edited a scholarly journal — my first opportunity to deal with top-flight writing. After a few years’ hiatus from editing came apologetics and, in 1986, a newsletter called Catholic Answers. I was glad to become again what Augustine had called himself, “a vendor of words.” By 1990 the newsletter was superseded by This Rock, which I now have edited for nearly nine full years.
But with this issue I happily relinquish the title-and worries-of editor. I say “happily” because, while I still enjoy applying the blue pencil (actually, in my case, a red pen) to other people’s words, I have found that I haven’t had much time to compose words of my own. I haven’t had time to write. As the years have gone by, and as Catholic Answers has grown, my time has become squeezed between purely editorial tasks on the one side and administrative tasks on the other. The latter are being reduced as Catholic Answers effects internal reorganization and growth, and the former are being nearly eliminated as I retire as editor. I look forward (as do my publishers, to whom I owe six books) to the leisure to return to manuscripts that have languished for an uncomfortably long time.
Not that I will disappear from This Rock. I will have a chance to write for it more regularly and more concertedly — my last full-length article appeared as long ago as the April 1997 issue — and I will remain on the masthead, as “editor at large.” But from the next issue onward, the chief editorial duties will be undertaken by Tim Ryland. He has extensive experience in secular and Catholic journalism, will compensate for my editorial deficiencies, and, I am sure, will make this a much better publication than it has been. Expect to see major improvements phased in over the next six months.
In the meantime, I relish the prospect of clearing out my in-box, reorganizing my research files, and sitting down at the keyboard with no end-of-the-day deadlines.