Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing

How would you describe the readership and focus of Writing on the Edge and Issues in Writing?

Wade Mahon: Well, we usually explain that we have interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary interests, so it’s pretty wide open. We try to be very interdisciplinary, providing for all disciplines by publishing things on first-year writing instruction, composition theory, teaching business writing, technical writing—also a lot of work from people in business, professional, and technical writing as well. So it covers a lot of ground.

We’re ideally trying to target both academic readers and professional writers—people who are outside of academia and would like to explore the same or similar issues as academics. We ideally want to be a bridge between academia and professional writing circles, but to be honest, I think most of our readers are academics.

Eric Schroeder: When we planning to start the journal, we wanted to do it on our terms. Our original vision for WOE was a cross between College English and Rolling Stone. And if we were going to do that, we thought that interviews were kind of a natural. This was before I published my book, so we had some interviews sitting around.

The interview I had done with Michael Herr was at that point an exclusive. He had never talked to anybody else about his work and we ran that in our first issue. We also got the idea that we wanted to do not just writers but teachers of writing and theorists. Toby Fulwiler was coming for a visit on the UC Davis campus that quarter so we arranged to interview him. I think at that point John Boe said to me, “Well, you’re in charge of the interviews. You know what you’re doing.”

How do the interviews function in relationship to the articles and book reviews printed in your publication?

e d i t o r s' n o t e

b a c k g r o u n d s

e a r l y i n t e r e s t s

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

n u t s & b o l t s

r e c e n t
& f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
& c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
& e d i t i n g

e t h i c s & v o i c e

g e n r e & m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
& c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

Wade Mahon: Every issue of Issues in Writing begins with an interview, so I guess we think of it as the “anchor” of every issue. The relationship between the interview and the articles differs from issue to issue, depending on whether it is focused on a special topic or not.

In our issues focused on plagiarism, electronic writing, or assessment, we specifically looked for interviewees whose ideas would provide a good introduction to the articles. Interestingly, they also worked well because (with no collusion beforehand that I am aware of) many of the articles we ended up publishing in each issue actually cited our interviewees as primary authorities. I suppose this is not so surprising since we consciously looked for the "authorities" in these fields.