John A. Talbott Writing and Editing My Way Through Community Psychiatry, the Chronically Mentally Ill, Academia, and Managed Care [Editing and Writing]

Some of my earliest memories are of my father's work table at home, with carefully laid out piles of chapters for books, papers for publication and slides for upcoming talks. My father would draft, write, revise, rewrite, endlessly. Much later I asked him how many times he revised each chapter, and the answer staggered me-it looked so easy and his writing was so elegant once it appeared in print. My father started writing in college, progressed to doing scientific papers as an academician, then became a part-time academician-editor of the "Green Journal" Medicine, and finally settled on his "last" career as the

So it's not hard to guess where my interest in writing and editing came from. I, too, began early; in fact, I'm very proud of a "newspaper" I produced in grade school that presented the news of ancient Rome in a modern format. In preparatory school, I had as an English professor one of the most charismatic teachers and meticulous editors I have ever known - he taught me, then my father hired him to teach him, and one summer in college I took expository writing with him. In prep school, I coedited the monthly school newspaper, the last issue of which had a spiced-up and obviously doctored opinion survey of "best" this and "most" that, which resulted in an emergency faculty meeting where my coeditor and I came a whisker's length from expulsion. Harvard, however, had a place for trouble-makers like me-the Lampoon, where I spent endless hours writing, selling advertisements, editing, cooking, and pasting up copy. Even in medical school I realized there was fun to be had. I wrote a silly guide to New York for incoming students and edited what had become a rather traditional yearbook, spending several hilarious weeks with a group of largely ex-Lampoon classmates captioning what we thought were ridiculous photos of the faculty and students.