Teaching & Learning: An Interview with Assistant Copy Editor Waleed Bhatti

Continuing with our series of staff micro-interviews is Waleed Bhatti, the Assistant Copy Editor at Washington Square Review. Waleed is a Pakistani-Canadian writer currently based in Queens, New York. He is an MFA candidate in Fiction at New York University. He has received graduate fellowships from NYU and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. He has a ginger cat named Sesame, who he has yet to feature in a story because she’s such a punk. He writes stories about transcendence, ghost dogs, and anything else that’s difficult to publish.


WSR: So how long have you been at NYU, and what’s the function of your position at Washington Square?

WB: I’m a first-year in the graduate program, so I’ve been at NYU since September 2019. My position at Washington Square is Assistant Copy Editor. I work with two other copy editors. Mostly, we’re looking for grammatical and stylistic errors; Washington Square follows the Chicago Manual of Style. There are certain stylistic things that the fiction or poetry editors are fine with, but the copy editors have to consider whether we should keep them or not. We do one round [of copy edits], the piece goes back to the editor, and they look at it one more time. They either agree with our changes or we discuss what to do with some of them, and then it comes back to us for one final check, before it goes into the final layout phase.

WSR: Did you do copy editing stuff before Washington Square?

WB: I did a bit of copyediting; it was mostly drafting and redrafting correspondence for this company that I worked at for a little bit. Someone would write an email, and since they knew I had an English degree, they would be like, “Let’s get Waleed to look at this.” So I basically, unofficially, became a copyeditor. I was looking at correspondence, making sure there were no typos, that there was nothing egregiously weird about it.

WSR: What’s the relationship between copyediting and your fiction coursework, if there is any?

WB: I think there’s some relation, in that the rules of writing prose are pretty clear cut. You’re supposed to know the rules of grammar, and you’re supposed to be able to follow them. Obviously, everyone edits and has editors, but my job gets a lot easier if the fiction editor already found a lot of mistakes to begin with. And I think coming from a prose background—you follow the rules in general more in your writing, and so I was more aware of them. For the poetry copyediting, James, a poetry student, looked at everything, because he is more aware of what is a stylistic choice in poetry versus a mistake.

WSR: Do those questions ever come up in prose, as well? I’m thinking about someone like George Saunders. How would you copy edit him?

WB: Yeah! For stuff like that, the way we’re usually taught, and the way I teach my students, is that if you’re going to break rules, you have to know the rules first, and obviously George Saunders knows the rules. But you have to start from the beginning. So, I don’t know, if you’re writing a story that’s twenty pages, and then on page fifteen you stop using a semicolon, or appositive commas, or quotation marks, it’ll start looking like a mistake rather than a purposeful decision. One of the ways we discern what is a stylistic choice or what is a mistake or a typo is if it’s been consistently happening throughout the piece. And if it adds something to the piece. So, I think with George Saunders … fairly early on you would know, okay, he’s doing this on purpose, and now we have to work around that and figure out what would be considered a mistake.

WSR: I was wondering if you could talk a bit outside of your work at Washington Square, to your time at NYU in general. You’re teaching right now?

WB: Yeah, I got really lucky. I’ll also be teaching again in the fall.

WSR: How is it going?

WB: It’s been good. It’s an intro to writing class, and we teach both fiction and poetry. It’s both easier and somewhat difficult to teach people who are completely blank slates. It’s very easy to explain things, because you can start from the basics, but also—when I’m copyediting their work, when they submit their stories, there’s a lot of stuff I have to go through, and a lot of things I have to explain about grammatical, stylistic errors; foundational stuff. It’s an intro class. Out of fifteen kids—maybe two of them do writing. But everyone who is there wants to be there.

As far as a seminar class goes, I think it works very well. Every single student wrote a story in a completely different style, even if they hadn't written before. The whole thing was a new experience for them. But they all came with their own individual voices, their own individual styles, and it’s really cool to see that, and help cultivate it creatively. 

Now—in our current global pandemic—we’re doing classes online. And fortunately, at least the way I structured the class, it doesn’t work too badly over Zoom. We’re all there; if people don’t have webcams, we can still talk to one another. Mostly everybody’s present, and people are submitting stuff. I uploaded all the readings to NYU classes at the beginning of the semester, so they’re available.

It’s been fun. It’s been educational for me. I think—for me at least—you get to a certain point when you’re writing where you kind of know what you’re doing, and you think about it a little less. You’re aware of how to do things. Teaching has been nice because I’ve had to relearn the basic rules of writing so I can teach them. I highly recommend teaching; it's helped me to look at my own work in a different light, and to analyze it. And it’s just fun to get a bunch of people who have never written before, writing and falling in love with it.

WSR: How have the workshops at NYU [the graduate program] influenced how you’ve led your own? 

WB: Right now I have Jeffrey Eugenides. Last semester I had Darin Strauss. With Darin, we had a very structured workshop. We would start with what we liked about somebody’s piece, then Darin would say what he thought worked, and we’d get into the critique of the piece, suggestions. Then Darin would give his suggestions. We were all bouncing off of one another—but it had that structure of what is good, and then, what needs work. In Jeff’s class, it’s slightly different. We come in—well now, we log in—and the floor is open to anyone. People will start with whatever their thoughts are. You might be getting critiqued for the first bit, and then suddenly in the middle of it, people will start talking about what’s good. And then we go back, and we move around. We’re still bouncing off one another. Jeff will come in, usually at the end, and say what he thinks, ask questions. And Jeff is really thorough; he’ll ask a lot of questions about what we want to do with the story, or the novel, whatever it is that we’re working on. 

Taking that into my own workshop, I structured my class more like Darin’s, because I thought that it would help these people who have never been workshopped before to be organized in the way where they have to say what they thought worked in the story, and then critique, rather than just critiquing. 

One of the things that I learned when I started teaching was that I had to teach my students how to critique. For that, I did mock workshops, where I got them to workshop some of my stories—and I didn’t tell them they were my stories—just to see what they would say. And some of the stuff was good, some of it wasn’t great. They were starting off with “I like this, or I didn’t like this,” but they weren’t really giving reasons for why. I had to encourage them, and say, “Anytime you say something, give me the ‘why’ behind it.” I think that really helped, doing practice workshops. 

I actually sat in on a poetry workshop in the grad program, Major Jackson’s class. That was cool. It was interesting seeing how a poetry workshop was run; I’d had no idea how it worked. It was very different from the fiction workshops, just because everybody submits each week. One thing I liked that Major is doing in his class, that I’m probably going to steal, is he assigns a prompt for every week. And then people write their poems based on that prompt. The one that I sat in on, he talked about the language self, where do you find the self in the poem. And I thought that was a really cool idea—instead of talking about the poem in general, to focus on certain specific things. 

WSR: What’s one thing you wish you knew, as a prospective student?

WB: One thing I wish I knew when applying, that I do now, is that you can negotiate your funding package. And I would encourage new students to make as much of it [the program] as possible. All the events, all the readings—talking to people. The main thing about an MFA is it’s mostly about finding readers for your work, and that’s not really the faculty, it’s your peers, the people you’re going to write alongside with for the coming years. Be involved as much as you can.