My Voice Goes With You
How a New York editor charmed the best spiritual authors in America
By Pamela Bloom
Authors can tell you a lot about their editors — usually, first, the horror stories. The most beloved phrases, slashed. Precious revelations, distorted. Covers are unspeakable. But then there are the love stories. Since my July profile in Science of Mind magazine is about the famed New York editor Toinette Lippe, I decided to ask her writers — some of the most famous in spiritual publishing — to tell me what working with her was really like.
“Toinette Lippe really ruined me for other editors,” laughs Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of “Wisdom of the Jewish Sages,” who found Lippe early in his career when he was still engaged in academic writing but longing to be a commercial success. He likens the experience of publishing three books with Lippe to Zen training, an interest they both share. “She was the master and I was the grasshopper,” he explained. “She knew everything, I knew nothing. She just seems to have an innate sensitivity to language, to what reads well, what makes a good sentence, so I tried to soak up whatever I could. Ninety-nine percent of the time she was right, and the other one percent, I discovered I was mistaken. I got to the point where I trusted her so much I said, ‘Don’t even ask me. Just change it.’”
“Toinette doesn’t take nonsense from a writer,” says Patricia Ryan Madson, whose brilliant little book “Improv Wisdom” came out of three decades of teaching drama at Stanford. “I remember she’d say to me in that British accent, ‘I knew you were a teacher because you say the same things over and over. While that is very good for students in your class, it’s really quite insulting to the reader.’” That was quite a revelation, Madson said, “ … that if you said something in four different ways, it didn’t improve itself! Toinette would tell me, ‘Find the perfect way to say something and then cut out all the rest.’ She believes it saves the reader time.”
Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, modern mystic and internationally known retreat leader, was initially approached by Lippe on a recommendation from Brother David Stendl-Rast to write a book on spiritual friendship. It just happened Bourgeault was already working on a manuscript, later to be titled “Love Is Stronger than Death,” about the profound romance she had with her celibate spiritual mentor, one that continued after passing. “It wasn’t the book Toinette had in mind,” Cynthia tells me, emphasizing that it was Lippe’s “finely chiseled courage” that allowed her to take a risk on a book that wasn’t a boilerplate. And according to Bourgeault, Toinette was “an absolute stickler” for appropriate speech. “For instance, when I would say, ‘Throw the baby out with the bath,’ she would yell, ‘No, it’s bathwater!’ Sometimes that could be annoying, but she could also pull rabbits out of a hat, like getting Isabel Allende to write a blurb!”
Jacob Needleman, world-class thinker and esteemed professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, published two of some of his more than 30 books with Lippe: “The Heart of Philosophy” and “On the Way to Self-Knowledge.” “I’ve had some amazing editors,” he says, “but what stands out about Toinette is that she didn’t come down with a red pencil and cut up the manuscript. Rather, she created an environment that made one do one’s best.” The proof is in the introduction that Lippe asked Needleman to write for the 1989 Vintage edition of the“Tao Te Ching.” Indeed, this introduction is possibly one of Needleman’s best writing, imbued with some invisible force that seems to flow like water through the elegant phrasing. “Artistically and spiritually speaking,” says Needleman, “the ‘Tao Te Ching’ is one of the greatest works ever, and I made a great deal of discoveries of spiritual truths during the writing. When you have an editor who understands what you are trying to do and not interfere, and who also brings her friendship and trust, that is a great gift.”
As the story goes, Lippe came out of retirement as a favor to Paul Cohen, publisher of Monkfish, to edit Mirabai Starr’s impassioned interfaith elegy “God is Love.” Not new to publishing, Starr had been primarily known as the translator of the work of the Spanish mystic Saint Teresa, and her previous 12 manuscripts, she tells me, simply needed copy editing. In contrast, the structure and logic of “God is Love,” interlacing Starr’s own mystical experiences with comparison studies of the three major Abrahamic religions, required deft hands. “I would go into these raptures,” Starr says, laughing, “and Toinette felt it was her job to tone me down and cut about 25 percent. But I trusted her completely because I had read her books and stayed in her apartment. I knew she had this clean, Zen-like energy I could benefit from. Yes, she has a certain ferocity, an edge, but she also has a Tao-like yielding quality that makes her editing feel like it is not an oppositional relationship. As she took her sword to my writing, it felt like eating chocolate for dinner.”
In the end, a great editor knows that the journey, the struggle and the final book is ultimately the author’s. And there comes a time to wean that baby from the bathwater! Starr shares her realization with me: “I was so grateful for the elegance and economy and clarity Toinette gave to my manuscript, but I remember at one point she said, ‘Now we can begin lightening up on the editing process because by this point my voice is in you. You no longer need me. You will see it on your own.’”
“And you know what?” says Starr, “She was absolutely right. It was such an education.”
In the July issue of Science of Mind magazine, the feature on Toinette Lippe should have read: Bell Tower is an imprint of Crown/Harmony, a division of Random House.
Toinette Lippe’s Favorite Edited Books
(Alphabetical order; all available in print)
- “The Great Work” by Thomas Berry
- “The Art of Practicing” by Madeline Bruser
- “100 Graces” by Marcia and Jack Kelly
- “A Year to Live” by Stephen Levine
- “Improv Wisdom” by Patricia Ryan Madson
- “Being Home” by Gunilla Norris
- “Bare-Bones Meditation” by Joan Tollifson
- “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” by Alistair Shearer
Toinette Lippe’s own books that she wrote have now been reissued in paper and ebook: “Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple Life” and “Caught in the Act: Reflections on Being, Knowing and Doing.” Her artwork can be found at www.ToinetteLippe.com.
Pamela Bloom is an award-winning journalist, interfaith minister and the author of “The Power of Compassion: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul, and Change the World.” Visit www.SoulinBloom.net. |
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