ABSTRACT
Anyone involved with professional writing in any capacity probably has dozens of stories to tell-often painful ones, ones that in one way or another constitute a threat to “face.” To some degree that is what each of the authors in this book is writing about, at least partly in an attempt to reassure other authors with the pleasant(?) news that these assaults on personal dignity are not exclusively reserved for certain groups (though some groups clearly experience them more than others) but oddly enough seem to be part of the communal experience in professional writing. This communal experience is undergirded by a tangle of social relationships between and among authors, editors, reviewers of manuscripts, and readers. In this chapter I reflect on the tangle of social relationships that accompany being a journal editor and, at the same time, an author in the same discipline, and I explore different angles of the conflicted subject positions occasioned by the requirement to write professionally. My goal here is to clarify some of the circumstances I think editors find themselves in, on one hand, and, on the other, to document the difficulty and sometimes the pain associated with writing for academic publications, even for experienced authors.
