There are several stereotypes of the editor-author relationship—psychotherapist/patient; parent/child; taskmaster/slave; mediocre wannabe/misunderstood genius. . . but one that doesn’t seem to get talked about is the one where the author is a kind of guru and the editor a devoted disciple. Paul Berman—who was not Walt Whitman’s editor, but is nonetheless devoted to his work—says that when he’s asked what his religion is, he says he’s a Whitmanian. You might call me a Timpanellian.

I’m not the only one—I was first introduced to Gioia Timpanelli’s work by another Timpanellian, Rick Simonson at Elliot Bay Books in Seattle. Rick had heard Gioia speak at one of the dozens of lectures, workshops, and performances she has been doing every year for some 35 years, often in collaboration with Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, James Hillman, Nor Hall, and Gary Snyder, throughout the United States. She’s won two Emmys, a Women’s National Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in television broadcasting and as founder of worldwide revival of storytelling. Norton published Gioia Timpanelli’s first work of fiction in 1998: Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily won an American Book Award, was chosen as a McNaughton Selection of the American Library Association, a Booksense selection, a notable book of the Northwest Booksellers Association, and a “staff choice” for many independent bookstores throughout the US.

I remember clearly reading the three stories by Timpanelli that Rick Simonson had sent me in 1996 or 1997, and being struck by how unusual and elegant and expansive they were. They seemed to exist in more than one dimension at once. The prose was so very beautiful—it seemed to revive Beauty itself as a literary value. The stories were warm, too, unlike so much of our high literature in which crystalline prose is accompanied by a kind of crystalline and brittle cool.

I’m sure Rick knew that the Southern Italian-American heritage I shared with Timpanelli would make me a receptive audience for the particular Sicilian elements of these stories as well (though my own grandparents’ roots were in Campania). Perhaps I need to go back a step and say how I first was fortunate to strike up a friendship with Rick Simonson. I was a 27-year-old editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (still called HBJ!), championing a first novel called Arabian Jazz by Diana Abu-Jaber. I wrote a letter to booksellers talking about how the novel fit into the hot category of “multicultural fiction.” Rick actually took the time to write me back and give me a startling critique of my letter—don’t ever tell booksellers what’s hot, he said; in any case, most of us see the “multicultural fiction” field as overcrowded and the fad as already on its way out. You shouldn’t be trying to tell booksellers how to sell. Instead, just tell us why you think the book is good and why you love it. I wrote him back, we started a correspondence, we met and danced at BEA (which might then have still been the ABA), and have been friends ever since. So it was in that context he sent Timpanelli, who had recently “broken up” with William Morrow, to me.

However I first actually met Gioia in person, it was clear from the first moments that she would be not just author to me, but family. She was one of the very few people I knew in the literary/intellectual world who was strongly related to my family/emotional world of Italian immigrants, who embodied all the rigor and generosity of the values of the traditional culture of my own grandparents, and yet was also a progressive, with a wide-angled appreciation of many cultures and histories. I also felt at home in her love of nature, art, a warm fire, and a good chicken soup.

A close personal relationship with someone with whom one also has a professional relationship is of course not always easy. In editorial meetings, I have to be honest with Norton that my view might be biased when a new project is up for discussion. I have a terrible fear of letting Gioia down if and when publishing marketplace “realities” don’t go our way. It can be painful for me to offer criticism (though I do), and Gioia is probably too hesitant to “bother” me when she knows I’m busy. We both try to be conscious of whether we have our “personal” or our “professional” hats on at any given time and be supersensitive about each others needs’ to talk—or NOT talk—about our work together.

Fortunately, Gioia Timpanelli is anything but an egotist. She has such a deeply communal view of life that she is perhaps the only author I’ve ever worked with who always refers not to “my work” but to “our work.” Thus she always takes the wide view of things—a quality that not only distinguishes her as a person but make her work so rich and deep as well. All of this makes her editor very lucky indeed.

Alane Salierno Mason is a senior editor at W. W. Norton as well as the President and founder of the very excellent Words Without Borders. Gioia Timpanelli is the author of What Makes a Child Lucky, among others.