Michael Mirolla - Editor
Does your writing need fixing? Fiction, nonfiction, poetry--I can doctor the lot. 40 years of editorial healing under my belt.
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Overview
Writer and editor with more than 40 years experience; evaluation and editing of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Run a literary publishing house.
I work best one-on-one with authors. Highly experienced in the back-and-forth of copy editing as well as substantive editing to create the best possible iteration of a manuscript. Easy to reach. Always available. And I can help an author prepare for sending manuscripts to potential agents and/or publishing houses.
What others have to say:
I work best one-on-one with authors. Highly experienced in the back-and-forth of copy editing as well as substantive editing to create the best possible iteration of a manuscript. Easy to reach. Always available. And I can help an author prepare for sending manuscripts to potential agents and/or publishing houses.
What others have to say:
Michael Mirolla is an editor who not only finds the clumsy descriptions and incorrect grammar but one who delves deeply into the work and comes to an understanding of an author. His instructions are collaborative, his eye for detail exact and his ability to comprehend the motivations of a writer, nearly flawless. His work spurs a writer to further stretch skills and concepts. Each of my novels was only made better by him.
—Brian Van Norman, author of Immortal Water and Against The Machine: Luddites
Over the decades I’ve had some unsatisfactory (at worst) and (at best) numerous pointless relationships to editors. Then along came Michael Mirolla. From his reactions to the writing itself—unfailingly from within my intentions, style, and tone—to his imaginative taste in design, I have been supported and seen my work enhanced as never before. How lucky can a writer get? A special honor to be accepted into his good hands.
—Frank Lentricchia, author of Introducing Don DeLillo, Ariel and the Police, Lucchesi and the Whale, The Book of Ruth, The Accidental Pallbearer, The Morelli Thing
Languages
English (CAN)
English (UK)
English (US)
Non-Fiction
Biographies & Memoirs
History
Philosophy
Political Science & Current Affairs
Fiction
Contemporary Fiction
Cultural & Ethnic
Magical Realism
Work experience
Editor
Self-employed
January, 1988
–
Present
(about 35 years)
I've been a freelance editor for more than 40 years
Portfolio (14 selected works)
Cadillac Road (Essential Prose Book 132)
Kristin Andrychuk
With its starting point in the late 1940s, Cadillac Road is the story of red-haired and fierce narrator Sharon Desjardins: from her earliest childhood memories of leaving Northern Quebec and a violent father to adventures in Buffalo and Crystal Beach with her mother and younger sister, Gloria; from dreams of escaping claustrophobic poverty in shabby Grenville to going to Toronto, mingling with... read more
The House on Selkirk Avenue (Essential Prose Book 140)
Irena Karafilly
It is autumn, 1997 and Kate Thuringer is back in her hometown to help her college-age daughter settle into her new life. A professional photographer, Kate has lived in Western Canada for nearly three decades. Before her marriage, however, she survived a turbulent year in which Québécois terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered an innocent politician. The middle-aged Kate is obsesse... read more
What do Jamie Oliver, Pope Saint John Paul II, Sammy Hagar, and *NSYNC have in common? They all play a role in Food Fight Inc., a colourful collection of Bruno Codispoti's sweet successes and sour lemons in his two-decade-long efforts to bring unique retail food products to the marketplace. Bruno's advice, laced with humour and down-to-earth honesty, can be applied to any aspiring entrepreneur... read more
Arise the Dead I: The Great War (MiroLand Book 14)
Elizabeth Langridge
Told in two volumes, Arise the Dead--part memoir, part historical fiction--spans the period between 1914 and 1945. The two books concentrate on the lives of real people--the author's parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others--as well as some fictional characters, all of whom lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise... read more
The essays in If You're Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change focus on the interconnection of community/workplace/individual and how literature (and thinking about literature) has a role in social struggles aimed at making that nexus more liberatory. The essays' topics include various social issues in contemporary writing--daily work, narrative, love poems, the te... read more
A Boy at the Edge of the World (Essential Prose Book 146)
David Kingston Yeh
Meet Daniel Garneau, your average gay hockey player from small-town Ontario. After moving to Toronto to attend university, Daniel meets David, a bike mechanic whose Catholic Italian mother talks to her dead husbands. Their chemistry is immediate, but Daniel is still drawn to his ex-boyfriend Marcus, a performance artist whose grandfather was a book-burning Nazi. A Boy at the Edge of the World ... read more
The Afrikaner (Essential Prose Book 161)
Arianna Dagnino
Zoe Du Plessis’s story unfolds against the backdrop of 1996 South Africa, caught in the turmoil of the transition from the Apartheid regime to the first democratically elected black government. A paleoanthropologist at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, her world collapses when her lover and colleague, Dario Oldani, is killed during a fatal carjacking. Clinging to her late companion’s m... read more
Bonavere Howl (Essential Prose Book 160)
Caitlin Galway
It is 1955, and the three Fayette sisters have lived their whole lives in the enchanting French Quarter of New Orleans. Though neglected by their parents, they share a close bond with one another—from afternoons in their small, shared bedroom, to trying to speak with ghosts beneath the sweeping trees in their garden. When the middle sister Constance disappears, the family believes she has run ... read more
A young, mixed-race composer, raised without meaningful connections to his Chinese heritage and struggling with identity issues, travels to China in search of his long-missing uncle, an uncle who vanished in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. An Idea About My Dead Uncle--winner of the inaugural Guernica Prize for the best unpublished novel manuscript--is about the identities we choose and the ... read more
Tacet (Essential Prose Book 169)
Suzanne Chiasson
Charlotte--a gifted but broken jazz singer--has found security and support under the roof of an overbearing French patroness of the arts, only to become trapped by her own dependence. There are no bars on the windows and no locks on the doors, but Charlotte is very much a prisoner in an opulent but unsympathetic world in which her self-worth is contingent on her voice. When the irresponsible a... read more
Part memoir of the author's early life--including his experience as a New York City cop and a US Border Patrol agent before he became a college professor--and part polemical discussions of a host of diverse topics, from aging, religion, and war to teaching and higher learning, corporate capitalism and consumerism, technology and media, this book challenges the beliefs and behavior of the Ameri... read more
Poetry Is Blood (257) (Essential Poets)
Keith Garebian
Combining eloquent lyrics and edgy anti-lyrics, the poems in Poetry is Blood both rehearse and flout conventions of lyric poetry to speak with deep-rooted melancholy about family and tribal history, ancient walls, paintings, monuments, martyred poets, and genocidal madness. These pieces have the wide cross-stylistic reach of elegy yet fearlessly resist any redemptive rhetoric. They possess the... read more
Throughout human history, great and free nations have been built on noble dreams. Recently, in some once promising nations, dreams of betterment and possibility, have been effectively compromised. The current political landscape, featuring cold partisan interest, calculated distraction, divisive fear mongering, negativity, and voter disillusionment, has enabled a perfect storm of toxic dysfunc... read more
The Massacre Confirmed Our Worst Suspicions (267) (Essential Poets)
W. Bruce MacDonald
Written over a 25-year period, the poems in The Massacre Confirmed Our Worst Suspicions are a curious mixture of whimsy, longing and outrage about the passage of time, memory, relics, unrequited love and death. In an attempt at objectivity, the poems are stripped of personal pronouns, thus denying the poet the notion of some ultra-special experience that the reader can't possibly have had. The... read more
Michael has 16 reviews
Professionalism
Professionalism
Quality
Quality
Value
Value
Communication & Punctuality
Communication & Punctuality
I approached Michael Mirolla because I sensed he was an editor who could and would get to the heart of the matter with my novel. I wasn't wrong. Frankly I had gone through so many redrafts, I'd lost my way somewhat. Michael instantly identified the broad strokes that got to the heart of the matter and, thanks to his prompts, I not only overcame a major blind spot on my part but could see my wa...
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Nicola Perry, January 2023
Attempted to communicate more throughout the project, but only received minimal responses, often of very few words.
The editor didn't really seem to understand my goals as an author, so the feedback cannot assist me in developing my book in the way it should.
Michael criticized one feature over-and-over again, instead of accepting it as an intentional aspect of my writing, and then actually he...
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Curtis Williams, November 2022
The job was a small one but it went well. I have benefited from Michael's comments and am grateful for his input.
Peter Jones, November 2022
Michael left no stone unturned in his editing of my work. He was able to insert himself right into the story, so his comments were very insghtful. I have nothing negative about the entire experience working with Michael.
Reuben Lachmansingh, February 2022
Having thoroughly explored for an editor, and coming across Michael, I went to further online sources to grasp the extent of his vast understanding of the Publishing Industry. It became quickly apparent that Michael, as a seasoned expert could at least in some ways support the work of a novice like me, who was not prepared to be hindered by my limited industry knowledge. Yet I knew very well, t...
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Donovan Moore, December 2021
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