On Editing at Eidolon

After doing amazing work for Eidolon for the last nine months, our Managing Editor Tara Mulder is moving on to a full-time VAP at Vassar. We’re looking for two people to fill her shoes: a new Managing Editor whose primary responsibility will be editing articles, and an Assistant Editor to focus on promotion and expanding Eidolon’s outreach.

Editing Eidolon, like all jobs, is more complicated than it looks. Yes, we edit articles. (Of course.) But editing starts well before we receive a draft, and it continues after publication. We enjoy the process, which I’ll describe a bit here (interspersed with some choice snippets from our editorial team’s correspondence).

“I have never met someone who uses semicolons this often. Ever. At least some of them are going to go. Kurt Vonnegut hated semicolons.”

One of the most important parts of the process happens when we first get a pitch. We deliberate: will the pitch make a good Eidolon article? Many ideas that come to us are fascinating but not quite right for our journal. Others may be too similar to content we’ve run recently.

“I honestly think judicious use of Hitler references is totally reasonable.”

If the idea is promising and a good fit, then what potential traps do we think the writer may fall into as they write? Discussing the shape of the article before the writer even begins writing decreases the chance that the piece will need substantial revision later.

“We have created a monster — a hybrid frankenstein’s monster of an article by all of us in equal parts. Congratulations?”

When the article arrives, we confer further: does it need restructuring? More ancient sources? A shift in tone? When it’s ready to go up on Medium, we proofread, fact-check, and format the piece so it fits with our style. (That includes one of my favorite jobs — selecting each article’s cover art.) We also discuss promotion strategy.

“It’s funny how a hyphen makes all the difference between ‘300-odd people entering graduate programs in Classics’ and ‘300 odd people entering graduate programs in Classics,’ though perhaps both statements are true.”

At any given time, we’re usually working on about ten articles at various stages of development. It’s challenging, exciting work.

Would you like to join our team? If you’re interested in either of these positions, the job listings can be found here. Applications are due by August 1.

This month, Eidolon published six articles:
Eidolon’s editorial staff revealed our secrets for sending us a successful pitch in How to Pitch (Especially to Eidolon)
I asked for more thoughtful comparisons between Donald Trump and the ancient world in Make Comparisons Great Again and revealed the terrifying faces of ancient Roman depictions of dolphins in Don’t Look Now, But There’s an Ancient Roman Depiction of a Dolphin Under Your Bed
C. W. Marshall reflected on the legendary greatness of Muhammad Ali, a Homeric hero for modern times, in Irresistible
Johanna Hanink reviewed Paul Cartledge’s new volume Democracy: A Life and found it “a splendid, updated account of the old standard narrative” in Democracy When? (You can also read Paul Cartledge’s response to the review here.)
Timothy Haase used a video game about a child dying of cancer to question Aristotle’s theory that viewing painful art cleanses our emotions in That Dragon, Cancer and the Limits of Catharsis

Our content next month will include a guide to feminist pedagogy and a history of strange artifacts found at archeological digs. As always, thank you for reading!

Donna Zuckerberg is the editor-in-chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014 and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her first book, Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.