In Process with: Emily Nemens
On letting the work rest, adjusting the scales in favor of complicated characters, and saving the Corgis
Hi Friends,
Today’s In Process With… brings us to the desk of the writer and editor Emily Nemens. I’m fortunate to have been edited by Emily during her tenure at The Southern Review. Getting my story into the magazine took many attempts—it was the third one I’d submitted to her—and it was the first time I had a genuine back and forth with an editor about what they were looking for (or, in the case of the stories I’d sent, not looking for). The best editors possess a patience writers, shamelessly eager to get work published, don’t often have; they’re willing to wait for, and do the work towards, the right story fit, character clarification, line. During our conversations and in her edits, Emily was forthright but kind, precise yet open. She asked the right questions, paid attention to her ear on the line level, and undoubtedly made my story better. I was not at all surprised when Emily was offered the position of editing none other than The Paris Review in 2018, nor of her many accomplishments as a writer and illustrator, which you can read about here.
Somehow, while doing all this excellent work patiently improving others’ prose, Emily manages to produce admirable writing herself. You can read her many stories and essays online at places like The Iowa Review, n+1, and Los Angeles Review of Books. You’ll discover Emily’s fiction is pleasing to the ear, to the eye we hold inside our minds—in her story “After Incus,” she describes the spotting of a train station like so: “its smooth granite backside rising above sooty tracks and rusting railcars like an implacable matron above a brood of wet-nosed children.”—but it’s generous, too, unafraid to crack the facade of its characters whose livelihoods often depend on the maintainance of such facades, for the reader at least. Many of her characters, like the ob/gyn on a fateful flight in her most recent story, published by the illustrous BOMB Magazine, Delta Connect, keep the depths of what they’re feeling and thinking respectfully tucked away as safeguards, and this makes Emily’s careful drawing in of her readers even more delicious. It gives me a certain pleasure to be allowed to enter a circle of knowingness, to be trusted with characters’ most intimate inner workings.
I encourage you to pick up Emily’s debut novel, The Cactus League, which embeds itself in the web around a star baseball player during spring training in you guessed it, Arizona, to follow her on Instagram, to check out these super cool watercolor portraits of every woman in congress she illustrated, and to generally stay tuned for what she will do next. I’m delighted to have Emily answering our questions this week.
What have you been working on this week?
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