Editing / Mentoring Services

An experienced Freelance Editor and Mentor, Naomi works closely with writers to help improve their poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She offers Mentoring, Developmental Editing and Copy Editing services:

• Mentorship: Naomi meets with a writer (in person or online) to discuss their aims and frustrations. Bearing in mind the writer’s goals and challenges, she reads their work with a careful and encouraging eye, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. She gives reading and writing exercise suggestions, and, if appropriate, helps plan a professional approach to editors.
• Copy Editing: this process attends to technical and factual errors, and some stylistic points (e.g. repetitions), and results in a clean text ready to be sent to a designer. (Proofreading would still be necessary once a book is designed.)
• Developmental Editing: this thorough process explores structure, form, imagery, word choice, plot and character development, and also involves as much copy editing as is possible on the text at its current stage.

Naomi is equally qualified to edit poetry and prose. As a Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester and Creative Writing Editor of the journals Critical Muslim and Gramarye, she regularly edits fiction and poetry. As a freelance editor she has worked for independent poetry presses including Waterloo Press (Hove), Survivors Poetry (London), Smokestack Books (Ripon), and Lagan Press (Belfast). In this capacity, she has edited twenty-five poetry collections including The Privilege of Rain by David Swann (Waterloo Press 2010), short-listed for the 2011 Ted Hughes Award, and Black Cotton (2019) by Sea Sharp, part of LIT UP, Waterloo Press’s mentoring and publishing scheme for emerging Global Majority poets. For Smokestack Books she edited the bilingual anthology A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (2017). Naomi’s prose fiction credits as an editor include the novel The Children of Grad (Waterloo Press, 2022) by Maria Miniailo, translated from Ukranian and Russian by Michael Pursglove; and O Venice! (Waterloo Press, 2023), a collection of short stories by Ukrainian writer Borys Fynkelshteyn.

As both mentor and editor Naomi takes a sensitive but thorough approach, respecting the writer’s voice and helping to hone work on the page. For further details of poetry and prose mentoring/editing at an hourly rate please contact Naomi here

Testimonials

Naomi Foyle is a shrewd and perceptive editor, able to hone in on a poem’s weaker spots of unclear imagery or muddy thinking, while always respecting the poem’s authorship and individual direction. For Blue Wallpaper we worked collaboratively to reconsider my collection’s shape and sequence, as well as detailed work on lines or stanza order. I improved well over half of the poems in Blue Wallpaper following Naomi’s careful advice, and feel confident that my collection is stronger after her helpful and considerate intervention. Naomi’s editorship is invaluable.  ~ Robert Hamberger, author of Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press, 2019 shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize and A Length of Road (John Murray Originals, 2021)

Thank you so much for your immensely helpful feedback. You’ve given me a great deal to go on, far more than I expected in fact. I’ll be ordering the books you recommended, and will begin working on your advice shortly.” ~ L.M. (author of a 13,000 word short story)