In writing and publishing, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been edited by men and women, by the non-binary and the trans; by the old, the young, the middle-aged; by liberal Catholics and trad Catholics, by mainline Protestants, by evangelicals, by hardline Anglican traditionalists and the Orthodox, by Muslims and Jews, by agnostics and atheists. I may even have been edited by a Hindu or two. Possibly a Buddhist.
I’ve written for Christianity Today and the New Yorker. I’ve written for Intervarsity Press and Eerdmans, but also for the Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge university presses. I’ve written for the Atlantic and First Things, for the Los Angeles Times and the Reformed Journal, for Raritan and Mockingbird, for the New Yorker and for friends’ websites, for Harper’s and Books & Culture and the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian of London.
However, I haven’t written for the New York Times or for Substack. Lines must be drawn.
On the web I regularly see people who have published one book or written for three or four websites giving extensive and absolutely confident advice about writing and publishing, and I want to say: Get back to me when you have had to adapt your writing to editors and audiences even a fraction as diverse as the ones I have written for.
I just had to get that off my chest.
But there’s another side to this story that I’ll describe in a later post.
