Professionally speaking, in the last three years, since I moved to Italy, my work as an editor has been sustaining my livelihood, not my art criticism. I’m not complaining at all. Editing is easily my preferred job profile. My practice as an art critic and a writer feeds into it. But because my primary material is usually other people’s words, there is this liberating sense of detachment from the text. And this is, in my opinion, the reason why all writers need good editors, because that distance is crucial. It allows you to work in service of the text, whether you are the writer or the editor. Most writers are simply too close to the raw material to allow for editorial intuition. Because they are aware of exactly when and how a particular sentence came to be formed, they form an attachment to its tonality. Only an editor who is removed from the text has the keen, fresh eye needed to let it shine.

Working as an editor has exposed me to a wealth of incredible writing and artistic practices. One of my earliest, best-paying gigs was a reader on more and other-than-human relationships and perspectives. Having to closely proofread and occasionally edit using a magnifying glass because the footnotes and bibliography were in such fine text was intellectually thrilling. I remember feeling an intense high reading each essay on a range of topics, from the lives of bees to the symbiont that lives in the guts of cows that digests the grass they eat, their presence thus forming the premise of bovine existence to an essay on the inherent gender and racial bias in AI and that most fantastic work, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’ by Susan Stryker that is subtitled ‘Performing Trans Rage’.