Louisa Castner

Right off the bat, let me share my enthusiasm about this writing contest. I am delighted to serve as a judge, and I am eager to read entries from a diverse collection of up-and-coming Edina writers!

My name is Louisa Castner, and I have been a professional editor for more than thirty years. I primarily work on books for the University of Minnesota Press as a copy editor, which means that I read through a book project before it is published to help the author with any grammar, spelling, style, or consistency problems. 

I’m also a musician, a poet, and a lyricist. I pay close attention to words and music. I think they’re always intertwined.

I can’t really talk about my life in writing without talking about reading—another pair that is intertwined. When I was younger, I wasn’t a big reader. I read very slowly, needing to hear every word sounded out in my head. I still mostly read that way, although I have taught myself painstakingly how to skim when needed. So I didn’t devour a ton of books in childhood, but I must have been tuned in to language at an early age, because I was drawn to books and reading and stories and words.

A turning point came in my teens when someone gave me The Catcher in the Rye. It’s the first book I remember finishing on my own, reading it quickly (for me) in under a week. I was so proud of my accomplishment and lit up by Holden Caulfield’s story. Another major pivot, after which becoming an English major in college was just a natural choice, happened junior year of high school. For some crazy reason, I dared myself to sign up for a nineteenth-century Russian literature class: I committed to reading every book assigned, start to finish, including Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. After that, I embraced my literary soul and never looked back.

Sometime in the middle of college I wrote my first poem. From that moment on I realized that the act of writing opened up a whole new perspective on reading a poem: understanding how a poem is put together from the inside simply made me a more astute reader.

I focused on poetry in college; wrote my undergrad thesis on the twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens; and eventually came to Minnesota to get a master’s in English at the U of M. I got into publishing and editing with my first job, as an editorial assistant at a medical journal in Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve been working as an editor ever since, engaging with language daily and helping writers become better writers.

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You are all trying your hand at creative writing, well before I did. I am thrilled for you—because you’re already well on your way to discovering the secrets of writing and reading, and how they inform each other. The world is a really big place, with so much to see, absorb, and read and write about. When you try to put down on paper words to describe what you think and feel, that act of writing transforms what you see and experience. It will change you. Let it.