Sam Cooney is a Melbourne based publisher, writer and editor. He runs the not-for-profit publishing organisation that produces the quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow.

Sam is also a member of a number of literary boards and is a sessional lecturer in creative writing and publishing subjects at RMIT and the University of Melbourne.

He says his career was “born out of a love of reading.”

“I was going to the next great Australian novelist and everyone was going to love and adore me…and that might still happen.”

Sam was first asked to edit submissions to the publication Voiceworks and says, “it was there I realised I was good at that and perhaps I was better at that then being a writer.”

“The biggest revelation was the act of editing somebody else’s work and publishing it can be as creatively fulfilling as writing your own work.”

He says editing work can be easier in some respects but you don’t get the same “adrenaline rush” and “pride of doing it yourself.”

Throughout this interview Sam talks very candidly about his editing saying he is an “interventionist editor” and that he will openly and honestly discuss with a writer how they can make their piece better.

http://backstoriespodcast.com.au/samcooney