01/03/2022

The Residential Editorial Program (REP) was held at Q Station in Manly, Sydney, last week, with 15 mid-career editors participating in a range of workshops and presentations on the craft of editing.

Included in the program were presentations on structural editing with Hachette Australia managing editor Emma Rafferty; the relationship between editor and author with Radhiah Chowdhury and Wai Chim; and publishing and editing First Nations authors with Magabala publisher Rachel Bin Salleh and black&write! senior editor Grace Lucas-Pennington; as well as presentations from author/editor Lisa Fuller, Curtis Brown MD Fiona Inglis and Hachette Australia senior editor Jacquie Brown.

The editors also worked on an unpublished manuscript with mentors Jo Butler, Linda Funnell and Grace Lucas-Pennington, before coming together at the end of the week to hear from the manuscript’s editor.  

'The speakers were fantastic,’ said Hardie Grant Books commissioning editor and REP participant Emily Hart, whose highlights included ‘Radhiah and Wei’s rich editorial discussion, Grace’s practical takeaways for First Nations editing, and Emma’s incredibly comprehensive structural editing talk’

‘The mentoring workshops felt so special – an amazing opportunity to bond with other editors and work together on a manuscript with so much time.’

For many of the participants, the highlight of the program was the opportunity to share knowledge and network with other editors.

‘Connecting with others – program participants, mentors, presenters, people who did very similar things to me and people who did very different things – was the best part of the week,’ said Hart. ‘We don’t have a lot of opportunities to do it in this industry, and it felt particularly special after an isolating few years. The discussions we had in mentoring groups, as large groups and at meals etc were so reassuring and inspiring and useful and fun.’

The biennial program last took place in 2017, due to a lack of funding and then Covid restrictions. This year’s REP included scholarship positions for First Nations and freelance editors for the first time, the latter provided through the Institute of Professional Editors. 

The APA thanks the Australian Council for the Arts and our Editorial Working Group for their continued support of this program, and to all the presenters, mentors, and participants for their contributions to such a successful program.