My name is Lynda, and I’m an editor, researcher, textile artist, and gardener working from my home in Dunedin, New Zealand.
My childhood home was full of books. I learned to read early, and escaping into stories was (and still is) at the top of my preferred pastime list. It fostered an interest in cultural history and the written word that drove my education through high school to university, where I studied English literature as far back in time as I could reach. I picked up new (old) languages – Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, Middle English – and became immersed in cultural and historical periods from the Anglo-Saxon to the Eighteenth Century.
My first editing project – an academic edit of an Anglo-Saxon poem – left me with a lasting impression of the intricacy of written language, the many ways it can be manipulated, and the impact a tiny choice, a tiny change, can make to the meaning and feeling of a work. After that, I studied the editing those long ago Anglo-Saxons did themselves, as they transmitted and translated the literary works that meant something to them. That opened my eyes to many ways in which writing on a page has power and resonance, but one way tolled the loudest: even after a thousand years, words on a page contain something of their author.
After several years teaching composition, creative writing and literature at university, I began my formal editing career in 2008 as a contract technical editor with an academic publisher. I soon began to take on freelance projects for fiction writers and indie publishers, which is much more fun.
I believe that no matter how light (or heavy) they may seem, works of fiction and the arts contain real cultural – and personal – truths.
That’s worth nurturing.
Refinery Editing Services 