Overview
I'm a professional editor and manuscript evaluator with many years experience with both book publishers and private clients. In those years, many of the over seventy-five manuscripts I've edited or evaluated have gone on to publication and awards recognition. I work with The University of Alberta Press (Edmonton, AB, Canada) on a freelance basis, and copy edited Norma Dunning. To our knowledge, her book is the first ever published collection of Inuit short fiction.
I also do substantive and copy editing for Turnstone Press (Winnipeg, MB), Thistledown Press (Saskatoon, SK), Wolsak&Wynn Publishers (Ontario, Canada), Arsenal Pulp Press (Vancouver, BC), and Radiant Press (Saskatoon, SK). As an independent editor, I have worked with award-winning authors Naomi K. Lewis, Nora Gould, Peter Midgley, and Helen Moffett.
An important thing to know about me: I only wear Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers. My policy is that if I can't wear my Chucks to The Thing™, I don't go to The Thing™.
Endorsements:
Kimmy Beach was the final reader and editor of my book Tiny Lights for Travellers before publication, and her eye for the smallest errors to the broadest thematic confusion was invaluable. Thanks to her careful and multiple considerations of the text, the book went out into the world in the best possible shape. Naomi K. Lewis, author of Tiny Lights for Travellers (University of Alberta Press, 2019), shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, 2019.
Kimmy Beach is the best investment I’ve ever given to myself. She saw what was good and real and didn’t make me feel small. She gave me the best of her experience, her humour, and her soul. Kimmy helped me see the cracks in my words, the way things don’t tumble but stumble. She gave me the courage to believe that I could get it published. Norma Dunning, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (University of Alberta Press, 2017). Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Shortlisted for the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story. Winner of the INDIE Book of the Year Award (Short Fiction). Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Shortlisted for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta—Trade Fiction.
I also do substantive and copy editing for Turnstone Press (Winnipeg, MB), Thistledown Press (Saskatoon, SK), Wolsak&Wynn Publishers (Ontario, Canada), Arsenal Pulp Press (Vancouver, BC), and Radiant Press (Saskatoon, SK). As an independent editor, I have worked with award-winning authors Naomi K. Lewis, Nora Gould, Peter Midgley, and Helen Moffett.
An important thing to know about me: I only wear Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers. My policy is that if I can't wear my Chucks to The Thing™, I don't go to The Thing™.
Endorsements:
Kimmy Beach was the final reader and editor of my book Tiny Lights for Travellers before publication, and her eye for the smallest errors to the broadest thematic confusion was invaluable. Thanks to her careful and multiple considerations of the text, the book went out into the world in the best possible shape. Naomi K. Lewis, author of Tiny Lights for Travellers (University of Alberta Press, 2019), shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, 2019.
Kimmy Beach is the best investment I’ve ever given to myself. She saw what was good and real and didn’t make me feel small. She gave me the best of her experience, her humour, and her soul. Kimmy helped me see the cracks in my words, the way things don’t tumble but stumble. She gave me the courage to believe that I could get it published. Norma Dunning, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (University of Alberta Press, 2017). Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Shortlisted for the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story. Winner of the INDIE Book of the Year Award (Short Fiction). Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Shortlisted for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta—Trade Fiction.
Services
Non-Fiction
Biographies & Memoirs
Travel
Fiction
Literary Fiction
Poetry
Young Adult Fantasy
Languages
English (CAN)
Awards
- Longlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry
- Shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction
Work experience
Self-employed
Jun, 2014 —
Present
For the last several years, I have been helping authors discover where their manuscripts are headed, and have helped authors listen to what their manuscripts are trying to tell them. I do a deep evaluation and then meet with the author one-on-one after they've had a chance to digest my suggestions. This last is the most valuable part of the process.
Writers' Guild of Alberta
Jan, 2019 —
May, 2019
(4 months)
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity/ Writers' Guild of Alberta
Jan, 2017 —
Feb, 2017
(about 1 month)
I worked one-on-on with twenty-five writers over a ten-day period.
Sage Hill Writing Experience
Jul, 2012 —
Jul, 2013
(about 1 year)
I co-facilitated the Introduction to Poetry and Fiction Intensive over two summers at this writing school, which is one of the most prestigious in Canada.
Parkland Regional Library
Jan, 2012 —
Apr, 2012
(3 months)
Portfolio
Why couldn’t I occupy the world as those model-looking women did, with their flowing hair, pulling their tiny bright suitcases as if to say, I just arrived from elsewhere, and I already belong here, and this sidewalk belongs to me?When her marriage suddenly en... read more
Peter Midgley’s let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Graduall... read more
Every year since 1904, when the ice breaks up on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton has crowned a Melting Queen—a woman who presides over the Melting Day spring carnival and who must keep the city’s spirits up over the following winter. But this year, some... read more
Secrets aren’t good for families. — from “Big Luck Island”In The Left-Handed Dinner Party and Other Stories—a collection of new, delightful, distinctive short stories—everyone is missing something or someone; every family is riven by secrets and absences. From... read more
Four years after Therese Greenwood and her husband moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta, their new community was shattered by one of the worst wildfires in Canadian history. As the flames approached, they had only minutes to pack, narrowly escaping a fire that woul... read more
"Ma'am, you sound like a very reasonable person. Can I advise you to just move?" A young family moves into a neighborhood with a reputation for crime. As they make their home in one of the oldest parts of the city, Carissa Halton reflects on the changing view ... read more
Lydia Buckingham is an ice queen. She wasn’t always that way, but after her parents uprooted the family to move to an isolated and rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, she has been forced to adapt this personality in order to survive in rural Saskatchew... read more
Duty, desire, love, and purpose. Who we want to be and whom we want in our lives. As Susan prepares for the birth of her first child, she contemplates her role as a mother, wife, and partner on the family farm through the lives of the women closest to her. In ... read more
In the heady days of the 1920s Jazz Age, people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks, and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day, with one ver... read more
In this comical novel about sexuality, relationships, and aging, self-proclaimed World's Greatest Lover, eighty-year-old Alberto Camelo frankly recounts his exhaustion at being tasked with a lover whose spontaneous ecstasy becomes too much for him to handle, h... read more
Tony Robinson-Smith could hardly imagine that he, his wife, ten Bhutanese college students, and a stray dog would end up running 578 kilometres (360 miles) across the Himalayas. In early 2006, he arrived in the Kingdom of Bhutan to work as a university lecture... read more
I woke up with Moses Henry’s boot holding open my jaw and my right eye was looking into his gun barrel. I heard the slow words, “Take. It. Back.” I know one thing about Moses Henry; he means business when he means business. I took it back and for the last eigh... read more
