A Hello from the Managing Editor

Managing Editor Lily Davenport: I’ve been doing editorial work, in one capacity or another, for most of the past ten years. In all that time—across three very different literary magazines, one press, three years of adjuncting manuscript-editing courses, two editions of my beloved Chicago Manual of Style, and too many Microsoft Word updates to count—the following have remained constants. They make up my editorial philosophy, insofar as I have one; I issue regular reminders about them to myself, and they’re a major part of what I hope the graduate students and undergraduate co-op I now help mentor will walk away from their time at The Cincinnati Review remembering.

You’re never too good to look it up.

You have to understand how a thing is made, before you can help make it better.

You aren’t doing this alone.

I’ll start with the first one. Copyediting is, in many ways, a job centered on looking things up. It does not require an encyclopedic memory, nor a faultless grasp of spelling; what matters is that you know the kinds of things you should question in reading a piece, and where to go to get those questions answered. Is that a permanently hyphenated compound, or a temporary one? How long do ceramics need to dry, before you can fire them? Should you italicize the title of an unpublished book-length manuscript? Copyediting asks the practitioner to adopt an iterative, cyclical way of reading, one that allows for both big-picture questions about logic and continuity, and (seemingly) small ones about capitalization or when to use a numeral in place of spelling a number out.

It is a humbling process. Like everyone, I am frequently wrong; the twin guardrails of multiple readings and of looking up everything I can think of, even when I’m convinced of my own correctness, help keep my wrongs temporary instead of persistent. Time and practice have helped me learn trust in my own instincts and judgment about what needs to be investigated, both of which are more useful and more durable than plain recall. I’m never going to ascend to a transcendent state in which I can mentally page through the Manual at will—but then, I wouldn’t want to, because I find the act of looking things up inherently rewarding. A colleague recently joked that I have a close personal relationship to the Manual, but I admit that it’s a little bit true; there are passages that feel like friends when I revisit them, so much so that I silently greet them the way I do my office, when I arrive on campus at the start of each day: Hello again! How nice it is to see you.

I feel a little ridiculous even writing about this next one in detail, because it seems so self-evident. But it can also be easy to forget, in the hurly-burly of searching through the dictionary and the Manual and whatever secondary sources are necessary for a given piece, that the first step in any editorial process is reading and listening. Good editing is invisible to the piece’s final readers; I’m there to help the writer realize their work as the finest version of itself, not to force it into alignment with my personal vision.

Working for a literary magazine, however, introduces an additional wrinkle to this process, in that it requires a copyeditor to hold the writer’s goals and vision in tandem with those of the publication. Most of the time, these things align very closely; at the CR, our genre and student editors evaluate submissions in part for exactly this, and writing that is fundamentally at odds with our values and approach is unlikely to find a home here. All the same, each issue of the magazine holds many pieces, and inevitably they take on different valences, or place different emphases, when set beside each other than any of them would possess in isolation. Ensuring some level of consistency across the entire issue in matters of style (and I do mean style in the Manual sense, not in the sense of voice or aesthetic) can help bring those relationships into focus, and sustain the sense of cohesion that makes a literary magazine distinctively itself.

And, finally: When I start reading a new book, I often turn to the acknowledgements before anything else. I love reading these expressions of gratitude to families, teachers, fellowships, archives, friends, pets, agents, (of course) editors, and all the other people, places, and things that can contribute to a book’s concrete existence in the world, because they speak so directly to the basic fact that writing does not take place in a vacuum. Even the most independent-minded writer needs help; all books are, in one way or another, collaborations.

Editing is no different. It’s a solitary job in many ways (in that it’s generally done by one person at a time, reading one Word document at a time), but it’s also fundamentally an act of community that, by assisting a piece to become its best self, helps to foster an ongoing relationship between reader and work. And the editing process itself is often a communal affair; at the CR, I run a weekly meeting in which the student editors, the other permanent staff, and I read through an upcoming miCRo together and discuss prospective changes. When I consult the Manual or the dictionary, I’m turning to resources made by other people; similarly, I’m never embarrassed to put an editing question to the rest of the CR team for shared consideration, or to call a friend with editorial or subject-matter expertise. Copyediting is essentially collaborative, and essentially human.

Coda: Here is a more literal kind of introduction, the kind that tells you less about how I hope to do this job and more about what sort of person will be doing it.

Hi, I’m Lily. I live in an attic with my two cats. I write fantasy and science fiction. I have a large number of enthusiasms, so here are some of them: baking, handcrafts, the novels of Ann Leckie, the music of Will Wood, dinosaurs, tabletop role-playing games, Disco Elysium. I graduated from UC’s creative writing PhD program in 2025, and worked for the University Honors Program for just over a year afterward. Returning to the UC English Department, and especially to the CR, is the dream job that I never allowed myself to actually dream of, because it seemed so preposterous that it could ever happen. But dream job it is: everything I could possibly have hoped I’d get to do.

I owe the fact that I walked out of graduate school and straight into a full-time job in higher ed to the mentorship and support that I received as a student editor here. The years that I worked at the CR as a student—my exam year and dissertation year—were hard ones for me on many fronts, and I felt then, and still feel, that getting to help make this magazine was the best thing about them. Of course, I want to do my job well in that I aim to continue the CR‘s legacy of promoting excellent writing that takes worthy risks; there is, however, no CR without our student editors, and I hope above all else that I can offer them even a fraction or a shadow of how much I learned and how supported I felt during my time in their shoes.

It is an honor to serve the CR as managing editor, and I hope to do so for many years to come. Thank you to the rest of the CR team—and to Lisa Ampleman, newly at Acre Books!—for trusting me to take on this work. I look forward to making the very best magazine we can, together.