When Larry Brown left the Fire Department in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1990 to write full-time, his rough and precise voice had already earned him widespread praise. He went on to win two Southern Book Critics Circle awards and a chorus of appreciation for his novels and short stories. When Brown died of a heart attack in November 2004, he left an unfinished manuscript. His widow and literary executors asked Shannon Ravenel, his editor at Algonquin, to get the pages into publishable shape in accordance with Brown's vision. She did, and the result is the crystalline and heartbreaking "novel in progress" A Miracle of Catfish . Ravenel is a very accomplished editor in her own right: she's a founder of Algonquin, where she has her own imprint, and she has been the series editor for Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South . Boldtype editor Toby Warner spoke with Ravenel about how she approached editing the manuscript, and what keeps her reading.

Boldtype: You trimmed large sections of A Miracle of Catfish, marking the excisions with brackets, but you chose not to alter the language of Brown's prose. How did you arrive at that approach?

Shannon Ravenel: Before I started the editing, I read the manuscript twice, very slowly, taking notes and, on the second reading, marking places I thought needed trimming. Once the negotiations between Larry's agent, his widow, Mary Annie, and the Free Press (who had contracted for this novel and a third when they bought The Rabbit Factory) were completed, I called several novelist friends of Larry's to ask them what they'd want done in such circumstances. All of them said they'd want an editor to work on the manuscript before it was published. I also consulted my colleague, Louis Rubin, a scholar of Southern literature. He told me that making changes beyond cutting could be construed as taking liberties. He also suggested that I indicate where I had cut.

Armed with this advice, I returned to the original unfinished manuscript, which ran to more than 700 pages. It seemed to me beautifully conceived and written — perhaps the most stylistically successful of all Larry's books. But it needed tightening. There were a couple of characters who didn't seem to pull their weight either thematically or narratively and who appeared only once each. The decision to cut those was fairly easy. And there were, I thought, a lot of scenes that Larry had extended past their natural endings. Thinning those scenes was also easy and accounted for most of the cut pages in the end. Larry loved writing so much that he sometimes got into a groove and kept going just for the pure fun of it. He was used to my suggestions for thinning over-long scenes and didn't often balk. So I cut. And that was all I did.

BT: What did you miss most during the process — discussions, disagreements, anticipating revisions?

SR: I missed Larry in every possible way. He and I worked mostly through letters and I missed the written give and take and the slow contemplation that letter writing allows. I greatly missed his extraordinary insights. I longed to have him send me a sign that what I was doing to his novel was OK with him. And, of course, I missed the ending. An ending would have made what I did easier. Knowing what Larry was building to would have made me more confident of what I chose to cut.

BT: I've read that you first contacted Brown after reading "Facing the Music" in a 1987 issue of the Mississippi Review . What struck you about that story?

SR: What struck me about that story was the writer's willingness to stare straight into the face of pain without flinching or turning away. That willingness informs the whole body of Larry Brown's work.

BT: Brown made frequent reference to the close, frank working relationship you two shared, particularly how you told him that his first draft of Dirty Work started on page 160. Did you have that kind of a rapport with other writers you edited?

SR: The way different writers work is as different as their books are different, as their personalities are. So I doubt I work with any two writers exactly the same way. Some, like Larry, don't want the editor to see the manuscript until it is as finished as the writer believes he can make it. Others want the editor in on every draft. Some writers turn in two or three drafts. Some turn in seven or eight. My process includes a lot of marginal scribbling on all of the drafts. What all serious writers have in common is the wish for straightforward response to the work, response that is never needlessly critical but always honest. I don't pull my punches, but I do try to put those punches in the context of suggestion.

I really love editing, especially editing fiction. Each book makes its own peculiar demands on the editor's intuition and creative resources. And each writer wants ideas for revision delivered in a particular way. When Larry and I first started working together, he still considered himself a student of the art of fiction and wanted more than anything to learn whatever I (and others) could teach him. He wanted to be a great writer and he worked incredibly hard becoming one. He knew, I think, that I believed he was a writer with unusual potential and that I wanted his greatness exposed almost as much — and as soon — as he did.

BT: Brown went with another publisher for The Rabbit Factory after you two apparently didn't see eye-to-eye over the manuscript. Was there any bittersweetness when you were asked by his widow and literary executors to edit his last novel?

SR: 'Bittersweet' is just the right word. I was devastated by his death. And I was grateful to have the chance to work on one more of his books. When he left Algonquin for the Free Press, we exchanged letters that expressed mutual respect and gratitude for the experience of working together on eight books. I didn't blame him for going to a publisher that liked a novel I didn't and wanted to pay him very well for it.

BT: What sense of a mission did you and Louis Rubin have when you founded Algonquin? Did it start out as a house that catered to Southern writers, or was that a consequence of your tastes or editorial accessibility?

SR: Algonquin was Louis' brainchild. By 1981, when he dreamt it up, he'd been teaching young writers for many years and was dismayed by the difficulty those writers — most of them Southern — confronted trying to get their work considered in New York. Louis and I founded Algonquin to be accessible to those writers, writers who didn't have agents or other publishing contacts. Our policy was (and still is to a large extent) to read every manuscript submitted to us in the order of arrival, whether or not an agent was involved. In the early days, very few agents were involved! And while we didn't mean to be a regional publisher, the first writers who submitted their manuscripts were mostly Southern ones. In the beginning, they were the only ones who knew we existed. As a consequence, our first recognized authors were all Southern: Leon Driskell, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons. When we first published Julia Alvarez in 1991 (the same year we published Larry Brown's Joe ), reviewers were openly confused that a Latina raised in New York had been published by this little "Southern house," something we'd never meant to be — and aren't!

BT: Some might call you an editor's editor, with all the time you've put into Algonquin, as well as helming various series, including your tenure with Best American Short Stories and, of course, New Stories from the South. What keeps you reading?

SR: The real writers are the ones who can't not write. I'm a reader who can't not read. I got to be that way in about third grade. I wrote a lot of stories and poems in college, but now that grades aren't at stake, I've written exactly two poems in the last 40+ years. I can't, however, count the number of books I've read — now about equally divided between published ones and unpublished. And I feel I've hardly made a dent in all I want to read.

-Toby Warner