With special focus on Lavon B. Smith, an Arkansas
[For this entry, lines that would normally be boldfaced for emphasis are italicized and between double asterisks. The material related most directly to Lavon’s story is boldfaced, for easier finding; you may want to read only this (first). Then, if you are curious about the context of within-publisher politics and so on that made his story possible, you can read the rest of the entry. This version has been shortened for editorial reasons, as suggested with elisions below; the fuller version is held in reserve for possible future use. A fairly large amount was cut for this blog version; elided remarks about Lori's ethnicity are very largely meant to be positive, but are explanatory regarding a situation that, most relevantly for the reader, is this: When it comes to odd interpersonal relations between coworkers on a highly-pressured craft/hands-on level, extremely ham-handed management is not only NOT appreciated, but quite counterproductive.]
[Note: This blog entry, which initially was compact enough given the content, became useful to supplement with reference to a much more detailed and careful account I wrote on my experience with the workplace All American Crafts in the 1990s. It turns out there are issues, which are somewhat tangential to the Lavon story but that still inevitably become useful to touch on, that I end up remarking on in parenthetical editorial notes. As with other things I might blog on, the truly interested reader might do well to consult my more detailed accounts only parenthetically touched on here, but these would only be available on a highly discretionary basis. Also, **All American Crafts is not the same crafts-publication company referenced recently by the Web site Preditors and Editors.** Lastly, the impression should not be gotten that I have nothing to do but scowling hand-wringing about tangles at publishers I’ve worked on it the past. For one thing, while exposés aren’t likely to change things much, it’s still better to tell the stories, because if you never do, then there’s 0 percent chance things will change with these companies, not merely a low probability. **But the most important point is not the weird interplays that go on with colleagues on the craft level, which are always mixed with positive experiences and, most important, generally ongoing creative input into the products worked on; the biggest problem in the media world is ALWAYS how managers, especially the more pretentious ones, mishandle what issues arise on the craft level. Further, AAC has long been unique in my experience in terms of how gender played a role in the culture there—I have rarely encountered anything like this for many years.**]
Here is one of those “small world” stories that also shows that, if you want to work as a writer, one of the benefits of waiting until you get older—sometimes by sheer accident—before you produce work you try to publish is that you find an anecdote deriving from experience of many years before can have unexpected but helpful relevance (as well as greater emotional value) in the oddest context.
For instance, in connection with my blog entry about Winter’s Bone and the southwest Missouri area—and incidentally what it means for locals there to have some nationally distributed artistic work derive from their lives—I can say I had some minor hand in the development of one Lavon B. Smith (his middle name, from Internet info, seems to be Benson), a woodworker who could design all range of furniture and other home-related accoutrements, who in the early 1990s got some books published by a New York publisher, Sterling Publishing. Mr. Smith was based, at least for a time, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which appears to be in the southern Ozarks, in the northwest corner of his state, not far from Winter’s Bone’s fictional and nonfictional locale.
How my connection with him happened adds to the drollness and fortuity of the story. In 1990-91 I was working at All American Crafts, the first place in which I did in-house editorial work, and I was a proofreader for, before long, all the magazines it produced. One of these titles was Creative Woodworks and Crafts, which was the only title with content that generally was geared more to males than to females. This title was started by Matthew Jones, who also helmed the flagship magazine Craftworks for the Home (CW, for short here), which had the biggest circulation of all the magazines there, and also was the oldest extant title there in 1990, I think. That magazine, unlike the others, became monthly (maybe starting before I arrived there, which was in August 1990); thus, because Matt’s hands became full with CW, the more junior title of Woodworks, as it was casually called (or WW, as I’ll call it for short), was to become mainly run by whatever junior editor worked under Matt on it.
1. The background of coworkers—with details needing jogging of the memory, while the young Lori was quite memorable
I don’t remember if someone was Matt’s assistant on WW at its very start (after it had started in late 1988, I think; by that point, there were about six magazine titles, mostly bimonthly, produced by AAC). [Editorial note: From a 1998 manuscript on AAC, I found there was an assistant on WW before I arrived—a woman of about middle age who, as I was told (by a woman named Marie-Claire who was a longtime worker there), was let go right about the time her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which was told to me as if in awe at the tastelessness of the timing.] But by about April 1990, a new junior editor was hired at AAC, who I think, at first, merely helped Matt out with WW and CW. About the time I arrived in August 1990, this junior editor was working more on WW than on CW; and by early 1991, she was the de facto editor of WW—with Matt having more of an occasional hand in it at first, and then being virtually or entirely absent from it in terms of regular managerial activity.
The junior editor was a young woman, age 23, whom I’ll give the pseudonym Lori and who had graduated from Rutgers University
But when in January 1991 Lori became the “editor” of WW, Matt was then listed on the masthead as its “editor-in-chief,” though as the year went on, his practical role dropped to almost nothing and Lori’s was far greater than it had been (and yet I was its “editorial assistant,” and I did have a practical role that grew as 1991 went on). Another practical aspect of WW’s management changed, too, as starting in July or August 1991, the editorial director, a forty-something woman I’ll call “Cam,” was starting to change the editorial focus of WW, to send it in the direction of being more for a female audience, and Cam started to be more of a (somewhat micromanaging) supervisor to Lori. (Matt’s name was eventually removed from the magazine’s masthead, I think—as it happened, after my role in it was ended [I can’t comment on the reason here, due to space]; and probably his name disappeared in 1992 issues that were produced after the 1992 ones, worked on in 1991, that I had a hand in.)
It was a typical, and perhaps prime, characteristic of my awkward role at AAC—which ended up spanning 16 months and some 5 million words that I handled until December 1991—that I was in the odd position of being one of the only two male editors there, and yet I wasn’t put on the WW magazine as its de facto sole editor. As a practical matter (and as was eventually reflected in how I was listed on the mastheads of most of the magazines by summer 1991), I was proofreader to all the magazines, though I started helping (more than with any of the other titles) with WW by late 1990 or so, and by spring 1991, I was its virtual official assistant. A more concrete measure of the extent of my role in it will be noted later.
[Explanatory editorial note, which will be more useful as you continue with the blog entry: Though this entry was mainly to be about a contributor to a magazine, Lavon, it has ended up being more about Cam and Lori. And with good reason: not only is the politics at the publishing company that produced the magazine worth burgeoning stories in its own right, but it helps explain the almost-miracle of how Lavon Smith’s work got published in a magazine at all (and then to the extent it did), preliminary to being featured in books. I had originally written this entry from memory, but then I returned to a long essay I wrote about this workplace in the 1990s (it was first drafted by 1994, then edited and included in a nonfiction book manuscript that covered a range of subjects in 1998). The long essay puts into fine-grained resolution and detail the still-interesting story of that place—and if some aspects of my story here seem to you less than believable, the fine-grained 1990s story would persuade you. A few things that the 1990s story brought back to me, which could be useful here, are:
[(1) How Lori, the woodworking editor (to be introduced further below), got her position of full editor in the first place (as I reference a few paragraphs above) is droll but telling—as to how the company operated, and how Lori and I functioned as personalities there and made choices that shaped our later fortunes there. (In fact, her unease at being in the highly responsible role of magazine “editor,” and her possible discomfort at seeing how unfairly I was handled by the editorial director in relation to her, help flesh out understanding of this situation very well.)
[(2) Cam’s less-than-competence as an editorial director is brought into much fuller detail, including the following facts: (a) In September 1991, one of Cam’s signature moves was to try to have permissions lines removed from their respective sections on projects in WW, so the magazine’s content wouldn’t look like “pick-up”—i.e., material merely derived from some other published source. Permissions lines, which of course in this case were required by contract (with Sterling Publishing), are not only a longstanding and typical feature of publishing practice, but are a legal reality about which there should be no question as to the reasons for them. In fact, the issue of Cam removing them (for what in retrospect could easily be called stupidly superficial reasons) set up concerns I raised at work, following my often having more of a head for legal matters than other people I’ve worked with in publishing—and these concerns led in turn to odd interpersonal issues with Lori (and in a sense with Cam). In the end, Cam’s decision had to be reversed, at Sterling Cam ’s directive was rather wrongheaded to the extent that more issues of WW were sold via mail than via newsstand, which was true for all (I think) the other AAC titles, too. (c) Another detail that is telling about Cam , which is not in what I’ve read in the 1990s essay but that I recall clearly, is that in a reference publication about magazines, Lori’s first name was spelled as a man’s first name not terribly different from Lori’s. When I showed this to Lori, she took it rather hard but knew who was responsible: Cam . In my judgment, either Cam had handwritten on a questionnaire for the reference publication so poorly that Lori’s name was misspelled by the publication’s editors, or perhaps more likely, Cam had deliberately misspelled Lori’s name so the impression was given to readers of the reference book that the head editor of one AAC magazine targeted to males was itself male, a deceptive practice that was not at all anomalous in how Cam, or the company more broadly, could operate in those days. **(By the way, if my story here seems to impute a lot of activity or importance to my job, which lasted only 16 months, my story reflects the density of this job, a sort of thing that was not lost—in terms of how their own work was to them—on many workers involved with AAC, including, not least, the art director of 1988-89 whom I refer to several paragraphs below, who, when I said I’d been there 16 months, was amused, understanding perfectly, and said that working there was like “doing time.”)**
[(3) Lastly but most important, I am struck by how Lori as a personality is conveyed in detail in the 1990s essay. She was very much a learning experience for me (as I was for her); a lot of how we related was along intuitive lines, as if we were feeling out how to deal with each other, while I was about 28-29 and she was 23-24. While her being occasionally headstrong and even arrogant comes off the page, her overall seeming inoffensive to me also is clear; **her more general patterns put in stark relief what I’ve retained in my memory of her, of her giving mixed signals, of being both “promiscuously flirting” in a (non-sexual) sense and yet apt to raise bitter issues of not wanting to be close in any sort of friendship way. (This is a complex sort of issue [which I will look at more explicitly, not regarding Lori alone, in a separate blog entry], and has come up several times in my experience over the years; young women can subtly and intricately make common cause with a male at media jobs in a way that shares aspects of flirting—in fact, I call it “work flirting”—but it is not quite flirting in the romance-related sense. But work-politics problems can arise when others misinterpret this, either in an honestly mistaken fashion or in a more grotesquely manipulative fashion. Also, nowadays, some young women without a lot of work experience don’t quite do it right; they either think a male’s “anteing up” it is real flirting, and they either go with it, or not, accordingly; or they simply don’t yet have the “professional woman’s firewall” that can separate “work flirting” from real flirting. Also, where some women don’t have this system down, it could reflect their own personal instability—transient or long-term—and in these cases, it can be immensely hard to factor out the relevant woman’s instability from simple practical errors/misunderstandings or “lack of developed technique” regarding “work flirting.” This area is both hard to be summary about and one that may seem to make some workplaces more trouble than they’re worth. I agree with both impressions. Where the worst ambiguities and managerial mishandling occur regarding this, I think, are workplaces that are inordinately “female-centered”—where not-rare boundary violations by women, habitual arrogance of women, and boneheaded versions of feminism seem to run rampant.)** She could alternate between refreshing self-confidence and a certain sometimes-projective competitiveness (e.g., attributing worse tendencies to me than was justified), this latter suggestive of fits of self-doubt, and this goes along with her variously displayed “approach-avoidance” attitudes toward me: all this suggests to me, today, something in the realm of mood disorder or “cluster B personality disorder” (to use a DSM term), if that isn’t a little strong for her. It’s funny how I never sought to pin a clear “diagnosis” on her in those days; that sort of thing wasn’t something I was apt to do at workplaces before then, and even with Lori I was more apt to understand her behavior in terms of her apparent family situation than with reference to something more serious like mood disorder. However, lessons learned from being stung by her ways in 1990-91 stuck with me sanely—if hauntedly—through 1995-96, when I dealt with another young female coworker, the pseudonymous “Alison” (at a much bigger and more serious company) who was much more clearly a case of no less than borderline personality disorder (BPD), the first such case of any close associate whom I had messily “in my lap” (in a workplace or otherwise)—and this one was complete with apparent decompensation, strikingly paranoid and narcissistic issue-making, impressionistic and over-much talking, substance abuse, and even hints of suicidality. My experience with Lori in 1990-91 was important in galvanizing me for how to be more “professionally defensive” in dealing with “Alison” in 1995-96. Was Lori a case of mild BPD? Hard to say. (A section of material was deleted here, not related to the notion that Lori was strictly a case of BPD, and actually more sympathetic to her but related to some generalities.)]
2. Some of the weirdness surrounding my gender’s making me suitable for WW
As a sort of humorous matter in retrospect, I had been interviewed at AAC in spring 1989, by Cam, and I had been briefly introduced to Matt by Cam , and she gave me some little hint that I could maybe be the assistant editor of WW, but this came to nothing. (Overall, starting months before this episode, I would end up applying to AAC—meaning, sending a query letter with resume—a full seven times before I was finally hired. This was a fairly typical method of mine in those years, which worked; every in-house job I had from 1992 through 1995, I got after applying for three to five or so times.)
It was a telling little detail, but hardly significant to the drama that later unfolded between me and Lori (good and bad), that when in about late 1990 I revealed to Lori, who had already been there four months when I had arrived, that I had been interviewed there in 1989, she showed a note of anxiety, as if I could well—by rights, in effect, if not also as a matter of timing—be the person installed as assistant editor in what was turning out to be “her” magazine, WW, even though its audience was males….
This was her bit of anxiety, but—at that point and more generally—I accepted readily enough (by spring 1991) the ostensibly odd fact that she was WW’s editor, and I was an underling who, even when I helped more with her magazine than with the others, could only squeeze in limited time on it. Believe me, with me being new to in-house publishing then, and showing much more equanimity in those days to seemingly absurd (if not downright insulting) arrangements with how you and others were handled, Lori and I lived quite well with the fact that she was the, on some level, not-quite-qualified editor of WW while I was relegated to a less prestigious role as multi-title proofreader.
(To explain a somewhat complex situation, and with me having to reach back to 20-year-old facts: It was fairly commonly understood at AAC that it would have been more prestigious, desirable, and fun to be an editor of one of the titles AAC produced [than a multi-title proofreader], In fact, AAC had gotten by without a regular in-house proofreader for some years—or, until I arrived, it had used a part-time proofreader [for all magazines] only sporadically. When I arrived and then was kept in the proofreader role—in part due to Cam’s insecurity regarding me, I think you can say—I made the role a dignified, responsible function, including setting up style guides for all titles, which eventually, in November 1991—no surprise, if you knew more fully how Cam was—was part of the basis for Cam’s perceiving me as a threat to her. Meanwhile, Lori, who was sharp and sophisticated in some ways, could show a more philistine viewpoint than one would have wanted in speaking as if proofreading was a luxury or a bit silly [for AAC’s type of magazines]; meanwhile, she knew full well that being an editor of a title—at AAC—meant more power, source of pride, freedom, and so on, and I not only understood this but shared in this view to some extent. **We actually were both, in a way, novices to publishing in looking at the roles this way, but also we were right to the extent that AAC delegated editor roles in such a one-man-operation fashion and made the multi-title proofreading role so burdensome that, while the work and the company’s cheapness made this all a draconian situation, the editor role was a desirable goal, and a reprieve, to try to get into.**
(Cheapness, did I say? An editor typically made about $16,000 or $17,000 a year, I believe, while in my proofreader role, for the full year 1991, I made a little over $11,000, which included part-time work through July and full-time work after. If I had my full-time pay for an entire year, it would have totaled about $14,000. Even though this was in 1991, that was still rock-bottom pay for roles that involved magazines that each could average a circulation, of copies initially distributed before sales, of about 70,000, and total circulation for aggregated titles within one month was roughly, if I recall, 500,000. Further explanation of the company could help you understand why it operated this way; but that is part of a fuller story I handle elsewhere, and I’m trying to keep things simple here—and about Lavon Smith.)
In fact, I increasingly assisted Lori in 1991 and my role in WW grew so much that even Cam became rather shocked by how extensive it was; but the situation was one of being creative and having fun, on the parts of both myself and the WW editor, and this was the sort of positive, advantage-taking “playfulness” that would only be done by people who were new to media jobs, especially in such heady conditions of being low-paid, lots-on-shoulders producers of titles with circulations as I just described. Though the material I worked on was fairly simplistic by later standards in my own career, this was one of the most creative times I had within a business circumstance that was draconian and otherwise left a fair amount to be desired.
3. Lori’s personality: important to understand—including as an ally to Lavon
Lori—who clearly was eager to keep her grip on WW out of a sort of young person’s ambition—was interesting, both in my view at the time and in more-seasoned retrospect. As I said, I originally drafted a chunk of narrative on my experience with AAC, focused especially on Lori, that I refer to above as the 1990s manuscript on AAC. There is a temptation to focus on her personality because, in ways for which she to a good extent wasn’t to blame, this was a determinant of my own fate at AAC (one friendly coworker blamed Lori for stark selfishness in my downfall there, but the coworker didn’t realize the full dimensions of what Lori was like; and, in a way that shows how Lori and I weren’t fully alienated from each other by how my job ended (or what she thought of me more generally), I actually was in touch with Lori a couple times after I left AAC, and encountered her in an odd situation at a craft fair in 1994—to sum a complex “aftermath” that also included my being bitter at her for a long time). But importantly here, Lori was an unusual mixture of (1) compliant “nice woman” and (2) a person who could operate along the lines of strong nerve—in short, could be an adult—not least when a pressuring, ambiguous situation needed it.
And Lavon Smith was the beneficiary of this in a way he couldn’t appreciate (for reasons including how editorial “back-room” stuff is usually not, thank goodness for you, evident to contributors in the outer world). In another way, Lavon also benefited from my input, in a way that even people like Lori and Cam didn’t fully appreciate in their respective ways. Not only did I do voluminous proofreading (and occasional low-level copy editing) for all the magazines there, but I also copy edited, in a sense, sets of instructions for a range of magazines, though it was usually referred to as “typing” the instructions (which latter always came to the company as hard copy, and which had to be typed into WordPerfect form—sounds medieval, doesn’t it?). Inevitably, especially with a magazine that I put more thought and care into like WW, I could copy edit the instructions that I typed, a bit. Importantly, I did this general task for a total of 131 sets of instructions, for several magazines. WW accounted for 78 of these sets. Amazingly, Cam knew this fact so little that she was rather shocked to hear it in late 1991, when she started having an especially ham-handed role in my part in WW.
For one thing, Lori was of Irish stock and had such an unusual name—unusual first name and rather-rare Irish surname—that if you looked her up on Google, you would find her on the first page of results. I don’t think anyone else in the world has her name. She was also one of the very few young Irish women I’ve dealt with who had the nerve—but a responsible nerve—she did. She could be adult in a way that such young women often don’t quite exercise but should. Let me explain.
[The rest of this subsection is redacted.]
4. General observations that may seem impolite, but aren’t quite so
[This subsection is redacted.]
5. Lori’s difference
While Lori showed some measure of all these traits, what was different about her—and I pictured this situation without having the fully conscious set of understanding about Irish-American young women I just described—is how she could take responsibility and have nerve sometimes—for the good of the magazine, or more exactly to meet the demands of her job, and in accord with her seeming to be the only one in her household (with her boyfriend) who was the steady breadwinner. In short, she showed the nerve of an adult taking proper responsibility, not of someone more immature apt to espouse some kind of quixotic “feminism” (with terms not all defined here, this waits for another discussion).
Now Lori was also a case where I got a picture of her personal history and family situation—without her knowing how much of this I knew—to help me understand how to interrelate with her. **I do this with all young women with whom I work closely, and the reason—since at least 1990—is simple: these women require this on their own.** Psychologically vulnerable types are who typically enter the media and arts fields (putting it crudely, who else but a crazy person would do this work? At this pay?), and women shape your dealings with them in part by their vulnerabilities along these lines. You can only deal well with this if you understand it. If it may seem to outsiders that they are narcissistic in imposing on work relations with their personal quirks, this could be granted; but I long ago learned just to “roll with” this (though I’m tolerating it distinctly less in more recent years), and in any event, my getting a picture of who I am dealing with is always integral to this.
In Lori’s case, her parents were divorced, and I felt she wanted to be more like her father than like her mother. Her father still lived in New Jersey , while her mother lived in Florida
[Paragraph is redacted.]
So the paradox of Lori is that she—who was also short, and with her big blue eyes and blonde hair that made her seem a little like a rare elf atypical of New Jersey—who could seem like such a well-mannered nice person in her voice, could also exhibit some will that seemed to come out of “who knew where.” It could also be said she was a bit spoiled from her upbringing—her father had some well-paying white-collar job—which I more or less thought about at the time, but overall, and especially in retrospect, I would say that **she was an admirable example of a young Irish woman who could be adult in ways that you really could use in certain circumstances and don’t see too often among her gender in her ethnic group. (While this may seem to be an irrelevant insinuation, the more I analyze this situation of how Lori figured into the WW mess, with generally a positive view of her, the more I feel it is a useful angle to take here.)**
###
As I work on this story, I am struck that it may seem lopsided, that some essential aspects may seem missing to you, and I don’t mean to tell the whole story, but to stick to the Lori/Lavon side. But a very important aspect of understanding AAC of that time is how the editorial director Cam related to underworkers there; she was truly a female version of the cartoon Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Cam had never worked as a managing editor before she was at AAC; though accounts I heard varied, before coming to AAC she seemed only to have done some limited writing or the like for one or two craft titles (that were not at AAC).
In fact, a male art director who had worked at AAC in about 1988-89, when I met him in 1997, told me that after Cam—whom he called “Chameleon” and about whom had other coarsely dismissive but humored things to say—was hired, she didn’t really have a niche carved out for herself, and started to try pretentiously to manage his, the art director’s, department. At this point, or even beforehand (when he had seen her meager qualifications), he told the main owner of AAC in no uncertain terms that he would not work at a company that would hire the likes of Cam for her position. This was one of many stories, some of which arose from the time I was there—some almost broadly comical—that reflect how pretentious and manipulative Cam was over the long term. [Another blog entry will address this fairly accessibly and credibly.]
Fairly typically for Cam , after the 1988-89 art director was gone, and as I heard in about 1990, she floated the story, which in 1997 the former art director found ludicrous, that he was an alcoholic. It would become evident she had a tendency to badmouth a coworker who had left the company, as if she felt a need to seal some “key consensus” on the person—which was done with me, too, after I left in 1991—or who was still there but who she didn’t know what to do with. (This actually is not uncommon among female managing-editor types, but Cam was quite crude and preposterous about it.)
6. Lori’s relating to Lavon, with Lori as functionary in a tight spot
How Lori relates to the story about Lavon is as follows—and her personality type and the role she had at AAC will become relevant to this.
Lavon became a contributor to WW I think before Lori was even hired at AAC. Initially, he wrote letters to the editor that were published, but before long his project ideas were being accepted for filling out the main content of the magazine, which was how-to projects. All the crafts magazines at AAC were constructed this way, and typically each issue featured about a dozen projects, with a mix of contributors, though for WW, Lavon ended up being the prime contributor (with more than one project per issue) of the big woodworking projects like furniture—solid works to furnish, not merely decorate, a home. Now imagine someone in northwest Arkansas
Lavon—who I think was a retired wood-shop teacher when he worked with WW, though I could be wrong—was basically retired, but was a resourceful and full-fledged woodworker. He didn’t just design silly whirligigs and “sill sitters” as you saw in the sillier crafts magazines. He could design just about anything—and build it. One of his earliest projects in WW, before Lori took control, was a full front door for a house (complete with the frame, if I recall). This was when the magazine was so much oriented to a male audience that it was as if trying to vie with the bigger magazines like Popular Woodworking, offering projects for someone who wasn’t just a hobbyist but was close to, or actually, a skilled carpenter.
By the time Lori was WW’s de facto editor, it was headed more in a craft direction, but still had “big-boned” projects designed by Lavon. Not in a way he efficiently controlled, he was the most male, and most carpenter-like, outside contributor to this mostly-male title in the AAC stable of titles. Of course, Lori also conferred with, and deferred to, Lavon on the details of instructions for projects, since obviously she was not a carpenter and not even a woodworker of a more “craftly” type. (He also got added to the masthead as a “contributing editor” along with another contributing woodworking designer, apparently in part to offset getting less money than he wanted. I have found this sort of “sop” given in lieu of adequate money to be not uncommon among some [smaller] periodical publishers.)
One time an odd conflict—maybe more than one—came up between me and Lori about an issue tied to details of a certain project—not a Lavon one, I think—on which I, who had done crude woodworking in my own life, had more of an eye to ferret out and make an issue about than she did. In one case, I persuaded her to have a permissions line read that a project was “adapted” from its source, which was in a Sterling Publishing book, rather than directly taken (with permission) from it. This provided, or was amid, some bitter tension between me and her—long story why. But she ended up deferring to my scruples on this. More generally, **she was firm about—and even staked her pride on—functioning as a very managerial editor in the sense of a sort of administrative assistant who was not knowledgeable about the craft issues—and she seemed to justify herself in this by knowing that it wasn’t she who had elected her to be the WW editor (this female type of self-justification in a job-role for which she is not entirely suited is common within other areas of the media world, too).**
It’s obvious there was a potential for me to have an occasional deep anger over this, when I tried to be more genuine in my work. One could say that to some extent she was pretentious in her role, but I think she still tried to do a competent enough job within the weird work parameters in which she was put—and this is another thing that helps define my weird experience at AAC. Matthew Jones, meanwhile, was out of the loop during the longer term of my more complex dealings with Lori in these matters. But more significantly, as I’ve already suggested, the person who set up Lori’s being in a potentially pretentious position—about which Lori could be “paranoid” in self-defense and/or in which she could run into absurd conflicts with me—was Cam, who was (more grossly) pretentious in her own right.
With his stream of new ideas for projects, Lori went right along with Lavon—she didn’t try to make the magazine more about whirligigs simply on her own account. (I don’t know how often, percentage-wise, she yielded to his initiatives.) The adaptable worker she was, by early 1991, she started out fully accommodating what the magazine had tried to do as it had come into her hands in 1990—which was geared a fair amount to semi-carpenter projects. By early 1991, while she was more in control, she still maintained the magazine’s tradition in terms of content. And Lavon’s projects became conspicuous as the only real “male” projects. (Note: There was nothing flashy about how Lavon’s works were presented in the magazine—he wasn’t presented as an ebullient personality. His works were modestly presented in the same style as other projects, but the nice photos, of his unpretentious and effective work, showed how solid and dependable the stuff under his byline was.)
Also, suffice it to say that, to the extent I sought to have any sort of voice as a technical editor on WW as my favorite magazine to work on at AAC, it was partly in being a dependable steward in helping Lavon’s workmanlike instructions and so on get well turned in the magazine, just as any other contributor’s was.
7. Cam ’s influence starts pulling up the drawbridge against Lavon, but not before he’s done a lot
By about mid-1991, Cam , as I’ve said, was starting to reshape WW. Cam was also the main force behind how my job there would be shaped—especially unfortunately in fall 1991—to the point that I ended up “resigning” in December, for a host of dramatic reasons I can’t cover here. But for a number of reasons, Cam started making WW more a female-oriented crafts magazine, not so much a male-oriented crafts-unto-carpentry magazine, which was effected mainly by Lavon as the main contributor. I think in part this change of direction was only Cam ’s preference. Cam had a way of managing things there that reflected some whim on her part, allied to her being incompetent in other ways, and also reflecting a more general lack of firm mission about magazine content, at least regarding WW, that held sway at AAC.
But she also sought to have more influence over those who could be more subject to it—and Lori, the 23-year-old editor of WW, was more susceptible to this sway than others (though Cam admitted to me that Lori could assert herself within her role in an atypical way), while others such as the middle-aged editor of the knitting magazine walled herself off from Cam so decisively that, creditably, she never even went to the staff meetings Cam dragged the other editors into from time to time. Lori, in her complex way, not only could exercise responsibility but could also be a brownnose, and this played into Cam ’s crude hands.
But also **Cam started pulling WW away from the male projects**—and in a way this is the most obvious, because businesslike, reason—**because they cost the magazine a lot.** Now costs for editorial content is a typical consideration of many publishing companies across the board; in this company’s case, without my harping on it at this point, it was a more held-to consideration than at others, since, for one thing, this company had large numbers of its titles returned from newsstands (up to 60 percent or more)—it’s a long story why the company was operating in this way.
And Lavon’s projects cost money. Lavon not only designed the projects but built them. He had to, so there were photos of the projects that were so essential to the magazine. His projects were shipped to us from his shop, photographed professionally in New Jersey Cam on whether Lavon’s projects had to be built. As a way to bolster her position, in separate dealings, Cam pressed on Lori to make an accounting of why the Lavon projects cost what they did. Afterward, I remember Cam being a bit in what I thought was a snakier mode in saying to the president that “She claims…”—as if Cam could no more stand up for Lori than to say she claims. Meanwhile, from what I saw in what Lori did insulated from some of this, I could say Lori did a good-faith job with her end, though, also, she got tougher for me to deal with when she was in the teeth of this situation. (Another long story how this was, but, in part, the situation essentially was that her courage to exert herself in her job did not extend to full acknowledgement of the wider view of things I had there.)
In fact, of all the magazines whose fortunes I witnessed in those days, WW probably got compromised the most—and certainly this happened more after Lori left the company about six months after I did—and this was in good part in how Cam handled the matter, which was also a signature way of how she handled her role there: **in rather unsubtle and sometimes unprofessional ways, Cam exercised demands on the actual hands-on editors** (in ways that could indeed lead them to leave the company), **at the behest of the owner who was making demands purely from a financial perspective, and Cam left it up to the hands-on editors to figure out how still to have their magazines contain quality content to the extent possible.**
The way my job ended at this company had a soap-opera aspect that was also a real learning experience for me, which both (1) tied closely in to the matter of how Cam exerted more influence on WW and (2) demonstrated how she was one of the worst, most ham-handed (and philistine) managing editors I’ve ever worked with. Lori stuck it out in this situation, proving to be the pliant functionary under superiors’ demands that she could be when she was in default mode (and sometimes even clinging to Cam in a way, in later 1991, than she wouldn’t have done earlier in the year), while—I quickly give her credit—she also recognized enough, when things for me developed pretty badly, how the company wasn’t structured as to allow good use of its workers or to have always-quality content: Lori said to me in one heated moment, “Is this place a scam?”—loaded question. (She also decried how they “don’t look out for your [general your] career” here, or such.) (Again, I leave out some of the colorful drama that fleshes out this story.)
8. Lavon gets his work trucked in when conditions are best for it
Things didn’t wrap up by late 1991 without some rather tragic development in relations between me and Lori. (Even in this, when I was under extreme stress in the wake of Lori’s raising a highly unusual issue, and I was walking on eggshells with her, she agreed with me at one point that Cam was not handling our issue well. That is, Lori and I were being more adult about it than Cam was. This was perhaps the thing that most symbolized my experience of AAC.)
But as for Lavon, well, he got all his projects in the magazine “in time”—his type of work was focused on less from about 1992 on; and in 1991, I think, in effect, Lori had been squeezing him a bit much in how much she was willing to pay him for projects, which for him, as far as I know, were priced on close to a cost-recovery basis (I can only speculate on this latter). He had more projects appear in WW issues that were produced after I left the company, but his share of projects within issues definitely tapered off by about 1993. Within a few years, I think he was completely absent from the magazine. Lori left the company, by the way, in mid-1992; she spent significantly less time there after I left than we had when we were both there.
I should emphasize that Lori was far more responsible for Lavon’s being booked in issues than I was (though I recall suggesting a project idea or two to her that she passed on to Lavon, which he did). And though Lori, in her mercurial way, could at one time or another in later 1991 deny or question the importance of my role in WW, it goes without saying that I was key to the quality of her magazine on a craft level for several issues. This was indirectly reflected, I think, in how quickly she left the company of her own accord after I left against my will in late 1991.
Anyway, independent of AAC’s direct control (I believe), starting in 1992, Lavon had some books published by Sterling—which Manhattan company also contributed to AAC in some kind of ad hoc partnership anyway—that featured projects that had first appeared in WW. This publishing of books followed the general pattern of the old-time fiction writer who first publishes short stories, and these get published as a collection in a book, and then the author becomes one of several books (which, in the fiction-writer’s case, are novels). Lavon had at least three such books published in 1992 and 1993, as I find from a Google search. And also, as I find from online, he seems to be still alive and age 90 now.
Once in 1991 I had him on the phone—I almost never talked with him; Lori always did, and they seemed to be some-kind-of-pals to the extent possible as New York-area editor and Arkansas contributor, with him doing all the hard work and her working hard in the way she was constrained to, to hold the line on costs. When I got him on the phone, he remarked, “[Lori] is some kind of gal, isn’t she?”—meaning this as a compliment, mostly. I thought this was ironic, because if he saw how she looked, about five-foot-three and not immediately appearing like a ballsy sort, I knew he’d be surprised (he could have said on seeing her, “She is a woodworking editor?”). “Yes, she is [some kind of gal],” I said, knowing I had my own perspective on this, but not feeling I was misleading with my agreement.
Lavon’s books can still be located on the Internet; at least some of them are:
Woodworking Projects for the Country Home, Sterling Publishing, 1992.
Country Wood Projects, Sterling Publishing, 1993
