The Editors at Bahr Books

Joel Bahr, MFA

A do-it-all editor whose strongest suit is developmental editing. I'm a seasoned and capable copy/line/proofer, but what I'm best at is helping you build, shape, and refine your novel. My edits focus on strengthening your story as it is and revealing what it could be.

I've worked on more than 100 titles, both for individual authors and large publishing houses. I cut my teeth editing Translations for Amazon Publishing (Amazon Crossing) before expanding into Romance (Montlake), Crime and Thrillers (Thomas & Mercer), Fantasy (47North), and Mysticism (Callisto Media).

How I got here As with almost all good things, it was not without a little luck and a lot of hard work. To make a long story just a little bit shorter: A pillar of one of my oldest childhood friendships was a shared love of fantasy paperbacks. Fifteen years after we geeked out over T.A. Barron’s Young Merlin series, my buddy translated a French fantasy novel into English while I was getting an MFA in Creative Writing. After translating the first book, he sold the entire series to Amazon Publishing and had me edit it before publication. By the time the third book came out, I had wrapped up grad school and started working as a freelance editor for Amazon Publishing. Things haven’t really been the same for me since.

Why I’m still here When you get down to it, it’s actually pretty simple: I really do just love thinking and talking about good writing. It’s what drew me to books as kid, it's what pulled me through a graduate writing program, and it's what inspired me to commit to editing as a profession. Finding the right words makes my brain glow. Maybe what you’re working on right now will give me that buzz, but even if it doesn’t yet, I would love to work with you until it does.

D’Arcy Fallon, MFA, Professor Emerita

It’s all about story-telling. I’m a longtime journalist and writing teacher (creative writing, journalism, English). For 16 years I taught creative writing and journalism at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Before joining academia, I was an award-winning reporter (Long Beach Press-Telegram, San Francisco Examiner, Colorado Springs Gazette). Journalism was my writer’s boot camp; under intense deadline pressure (the beast is always hungry), I learned the importance of succinct and clear writing. And being an interviewer taught me how to really listen to people. Over the years I’ve won dozens of regional and national awards for features, personal columns, and deadline stories. My stories have been published in a number of places, including The Sun, Image, The East Bay Review, North Dakota Quarterly and other literary journals. In 2004, my memoir, So Late So Soon, was published by Hawthorne Books. The book offers an irreverent, fly-on-the wall view of life in an isolated religious commune in the early 1970s. In 2016 I won an Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award for my personal essay, Camp Wonder, about a long-distance romance against the backdrop of one of the nation’s biggest mining boom. From 2012 to 2020, I directed Wittenberg’s Journalism Program. As a professor of writing, I’ve been privileged to help others find their voice, hone their craft, and uncover what they really want to say. The stories I was drawn to as a journalist had to do with ordinary people, not stars, regular people under pressure, struggling with addiction, poverty, homelessness—folks at life’s knifepoint. Now, as a reader (and a writer), I'm interested in tales about grit and perseverance, whether they're set in a galaxy far, far away or unfold in a muggy Midwestern courtroom.  Although I’ve just retired from teaching, I’m still passionate about writing and committed to empowering writers on their storytelling journeys, from giving detailed feedback and analysis, shaping, editing, revising, and getting published. I look forward to working with you.

Michael Sakoda, MFA

I hold a BA from UC Berkeley where I minored in Creative Writing and an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College where I received the Agnes Butler Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction. My fiction and essays have appear in numerous publications, most recently the Oakland Review, and the Sonora Review. With over seven years of work as the Submissions Editor for the East Bay Review, and over four years’ experience as a journalist, I’m the perfect person to chip away at the metaphorical marble of your book—the redundancies and grammatical imperfections, the dialogue and point of view problems, the plot holes and underdeveloped characters—leaving your manuscript the true piece of art it was destined to be.