Working With Editors Nobody Talks About
Most people who publish in Australian short fiction never mention Carrie Dunai or Carrie Schenken. They are the kind of editors who get things done quietly and move on to the next manuscript without building a public profile. I have worked with both of them across several collections over the past few years, and the difference between having one of them on your project and not is something you feel immediately in the revision process. Their primary work has been centered around editorial curation and collection-building, particularly within Australian literary publishing. They tend to operate through smaller presses and independent imprints rather than the major houses. This means you will rarely find press releases about their projects, but their names appear consistently in acknowledgments and editorial credits for well-regarded collections. I remember sending a manuscript to an editor who was new to short fiction. They asked me three structural questions in their first email. Carrie Dunai asked twenty. She did not ask them to be difficult. She asked them because she had already read every version of the story and knew exactly where the narrative was stalling. The turnaround time was usually about ten days for an initial editorial response, which is fast for this kind of detailed work.
Carrie Schenken works differently. Her notes are often lighter on the page but land harder. She will return a manuscript with maybe two pages of comments and a single sentence at the end that changes how you think about the whole thing. I had a story where she flagged that the ending felt earned but not inevitable. That distinction matters more than most writers realize. I spent three weeks restructuring the final third based on that one observation, and the story opened up in a way it never had before. One practical thing nobody warns you about: both editors tend to favor manuscripts that commit to a specific voice and stick with it rather than shifting tones between stories. I learned this the hard way when I submitted a collection with a deliberate structural experiment in the middle story. The feedback was polite but the rejection noted that the tonal inconsistency made the collection read as two separate projects. Take that to heart before you send anything out. If you are trying to track down their current contact information or submission guidelines, start with the presses they are most recently attached to rather than searching for individual email addresses. Their availability changes. Some periods they are taking submissions, other times they are deep in production and not responding to inquiries for months. I once waited six months for a response that never came because I did not check whether they were actively editing at that point. Sending a follow-up email after four weeks is acceptable. Sending three is not.
The upside of working with editors like this is that the revision process is usually thorough but not. A typical full manuscript review takes about three to four weeks from submission to return. The downside is that their expectations are high and their notes can be blunt. Do not expect encouragement-forward feedback. You will get what needs to change, listed clearly, with no padding. I would recommend preparing your collection before you submit by reading it aloud and marking every spot where you hesitate. Both Dunai and Schenken seem to pick up on those moments immediately, sometimes even when the writer does not. That is the actual value of having them on your manuscript: they read differently than most other editors, and their attention to rhythm and narrative momentum tends to tighten work significantly in a single pass.
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