From outgoing executive editor Jim Hicks’s essay in the Spring 2025 issue of The Massachusetts Review.

Back in the spring of 2009, shortly after taking this job, I met with the Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinović. I confessed to him that I had real doubts about my qualifications. He responded, “You’ll be a great editor! You have no ego at all!” I wondered if there has ever been a person with no ego. Only when I read Ruth Ozeki on the three marks of existence according to Zen teachings did I begin to get a sense of what he might have meant. As Ozeki reminds us, “no-self” is the second mark of existence. The first is “impermanence” and the third is “suffering,” and each is a consequence of the others. All three are necessary lessons for an editor.

At a quarterly, every three months a bunch of boxes arrive at the office; you open them and find this wonderful gift inside, a new thing under the sun. And you think to yourself, Wow, that’s really something. You helped make it happen. You are not saving the world, of course, but this thing is good, and permanent, an addition to the archive.

For me, the work of editing is most similar to something I did nearly a lifetime ago, during the Eighties, when I worked as a lighting designer for an experimental theater company in Boston. Lighting for stage productions should be the equivalent of attention in the mind’s eye. We’re hardwired to look at what is brightest, or what is moving; the job of a lighting designer is to focus and gather the audience so that they attend to what matters most onstage at any given moment. Editing is similar. Like that of a lighting designer, the task is to take work that is there and make it clearer, cleaner—to reveal it more fully, on its own terms. Also like that of a lighting designer, the work of an editor should be invisible; if someone sees something you’ve done, it’s generally a mistake. Pay no attention to that person behind the curtain!