Adrienne Jansen

At Landing Press we are currently sending out a call for submissions for our latest anthology, which will be about water. We’ve been going for ten years now, not bad for a tiny press run by a group of volunteers (although very skilled volunteers). Our new book will be, as always, poetry that everyone can enjoy, and will include very well-known poets and first-time writers, and about two-thirds of it will be submitted poems. We’ll receive 300-400 poems and we’ll select about 60 from those.

The submission process – inviting people all over the country to send work on a particular theme – is the traditional and conventional  and efficient way an anthology is put together.

But at Landing Press we are also committed to including voices not normally heard – in past anthologies these have been the homeless, cleaners, people queueing for free food, people living in cars.  And we won’t get these poems through a submission process. That process depends on two things.  First, that you know about the proposed publication. The call for submissions will come through various writers’ and other networks and contacts, and you need to be part of one of those networks.

Secondly, you need to have the confidence to send your work to an unknown  person who will read your poem and make a decision about it. Even for very good writers, that can be daunting. For new writers, it can be an insurmountable wall.

So the submission process works very well for part of the population – people like me, and maybe you if you are reading this – but we’re a small part.

At Landing Press we’ve been very aware of this for several years. Our first anthology was More of us, poems by migrants and ex-refugees. We called for submissions and received many excellent poems. Then we looked at the gaps: no poems by new migrants, or people learning English, or students. So we ran writing workshops with English Language Partners (which offers English language learning programmes) and with ESOL students in four high schools. That way we created a collection with the range and diversity we wanted.

For our next anthology Somewhere a cleaner – poems by and about cleaners – a nationwide call for submissions resulted in a very large number of poems. There were lots of very good poems (a lot of Kiwis clean on their OE!). But the problem was that about 90% were by pākehā writers; that didn’t reflect the cleaning population of Aotearoa New Zealand. We decided not to publish the book until it better represented the cleaning industry. But we were under covid restrictions and couldn’t run workshops. So we went out and found cleaners, in offices, boatyards, window cleaning companies, rest homes, and railway stations. We worked with the union E Tū and with cleaning companies (one company ran a competition for its employees!) And we mentored people. We’ve developed a way of working with new writers, which enables them to write in their own voice, and learn to edit their work, and slowly we expanded the range of the book.

With our next anthology More than a roof, poems about housing, we had a clearer idea of how we wanted to work – with partner organisations. Our two major partners were the Wellington City Mission and Community Housing Aotearoa.  By working with them we were able to include poems by the genuinely homeless, those in transitional housing and in social housing.

Then we second-guessed ourselves. In the next year, we were pushed as a team for resources, so we decided to choose the theme of generations for the next anthology. We chose the theme because it was less specific than earlier themes, and maybe this was a book we could complete largely through submissions. Of course we were wrong. We read through a years’ worth of submissions, and although we had many excellent poems, the range and diversity we wanted weren’t there. We lacked the voices that one doesn’t usually hear that we are committed to including. So we gave ourselves another year, to get the poems that we knew would never be submitted to us.  We ran workshops in retirement villages, with climate change activists, grandparents and grandchildren, teenagers, a mental health facility, the Māori Women’s Welfare League,  Migrant Connexions in New Plymouth, Homeground in Auckland, a group of Arabic-speaking women, and high school students.

So our new book, on water, will be a mix of poems from writers all over the country, and poems that will come from workshops and mentoring.

There’s nothing wrong with the submission process. We depend on it for a large part of every collection. It’s an essential and very efficient way of gathering work. But it’s always useful for those of us privileged enough to a) have access to the information, and b) have the confidence to submit, to remember that we are part of a relatively small group. The wonderful challenge is to think about how we can keep pushing out the boundaries of the literary landscape to include a wider range of people. The effect on a person, who has never written before, or ever seen themselves as a writer, of writing their first poem,  learning how they can strengthen it, seeing it published in a high quality mainstream book, maybe reading it an event, can be transforming. Both for the writer, but also for the reader, who might discover a completely new perspective.

As part of the Verb festival in Wellington in 2024, I was a member of a panel discussing the question of whether there is an imbalance of power between editor and writer in the editing process. This question is of particular interest to us at Landing Press: we are very hands-on editors, because we work with such a diverse range of writers when compiling our anthologies. So we decided to survey all the writers in Now and then, poems about generations, about the editing process. Rhia de Jong, on the Landing Press team, conducted the survey, and together we wrote up the results. It was interesting for us, and certainly informs our continuing editing processes. We think it might be of interest to other editors of poetry, so I’ve included the full article here.

Editing poetry – Is there an imbalance?

Rhia de Jong and Adrienne Jansen

Is there a power imbalance in the relationship between a writer and an editor? Do writers feel free to refuse an editor’s suggested changes?

Near the end of 2024, Landing Press conducted a survey on editing poetry with poets featured in our anthology Now and Then. We were prompted by a panel discussion on this subject in the Verb Festival; during the discussion the question of a power imbalance between writer and editor came up. This question is of particular interest to us at Landing Press so we decided to pursue it further.

For some people, poetry is seen as a personal and subjective form of writing to which the editing practice does not apply. However, most writers, ourselves included, see poetry as a form which generally can be strengthened with careful, or maybe rigorous, editing. We see editing as being as valuable for poetry as it is for prose.

Landing Press publishes anthologies of accessible poems, with a social justice edge. We’re committed to including a wide diversity of voices, and particularly voices rarely heard. So we publish the whole range from well-known established writers to first time writers. But this means that we need to be willing to invest a large amount of time working, particularly with new writers, in an editing or mentoring capacity.

Also, our criterion for selection is not simply  ‘the best’. We may want to include a poem because of its unique perspective, while recognising that it may need substantial work to bring it to a publishable standard.

We are unapologetically hands-on and often rigorous editors. And although we have a number of new writers, we treat all writers the same. We are always clear that we are offering suggestions only, and that the final decision always remains with the writer.

But we also know that there’s an emotional punch in the editing process. No matter how experienced we are as writers, receiving feedback on our work can require a deep breath, a step back from a default defensive position, and time to consider the suggestions.

The panel discussion at Verb made us realise that we were in a unique position to gather data on the editing process – because we had just published an anthology which involved a lot of editing, because we have such a wide range of writers, and because we maintain communication with the writers, so we have a relationship with them.

We set up a survey through SurveyMonkey, to which 34 writers responded anonymously. The survey asked three simple questions. Underlying them were two questions that we were asking ourselves: is there a power imbalance that might affect the way writers respond to us, and can we do better?

The questions, and responses, were:

1. Was the editing process helpful?

Yes – 30 (88%)  No. 1 (3%)  Not sure 3 (9%)

2. Did you feel you could say no to editing suggestions for your poem?

Yes 24 (71%)  No 3 (9%) Not sure 7 (20%)

3. If changes were made to your original poem, do you believe your poem was better after the editing was completed?

Yes 23  (74%)  No 2 (6%)  Not sure 6 (20%).

So there was a high level of satisfaction (88% seeing the editing process as helpful) but there was obviously room for improvement.

The survey also provided an opportunity to comment, and 24 writers did so. This was probably the most valuable part of the survey.

The comments were generally very positive, and a number of writers mentioned how the editing process would help them with future writing.

Obviously for some writers we didn’t make it clear enough up front that we were offering suggestions only. We need to state this more than once, especially for writers not familiar with the editing process.

The comments underlined how important it is for us to explain why we are suggesting certain editing changes. Several writers observed how useful/essential that is.

One writer was clearly unhappy with the editing process, which they found too intrusive, although they concluded that their poem was stronger for it!

There was a comment that more time would be useful: this is always tricky, because publishing runs to such tight deadlines, yet we know that the whole editing process requires a generosity of time.

We respond to writers as ‘The Landing Press team’. One writer felt that it would be better dealing with a named individual. We’ll think about that. We work as a team, under the oversight of a very experienced editor, and we also employ a consulting editor as an extra pair of eyes on challenging or unresolved questions. The editing of many of the poems is a consultative process.

This has been a very valuable exercise for Landing Press. We see ourselves as building a community of writers, and we certainly don’t want some imbalance of power, or any ‘us and them’ feeling. In 2025 there is a team of seven running Landing Press, and we are all writers ourselves. We also describe Landing Press as a learning press, where hopefully everyone – the team, the contributing writers – is on a learning path. Over the last few months we have been working on our new anthology Potluck, poems about food. Once again, we’ve been impressed with the generosity and openness of the writers to consider editing suggestions and discuss options. From our end, we hope we’ve paid attention to the need to explain why we might be suggesting editing changes. This survey has shaped the editing process for us, and given us a better understanding of how our writers experience this process.