The Glitzy Bits

Meghan O’Rourke is a best-selling, award-winning poet, memoirist, and critic who also happens to be my neighbor. She is the person whose door I knock on when I want to discuss an idea for a book or rehearse the argument of an essay, or to gossip, or to propose a crazy, impractical scheme like opening an independent bookstore in our college town. Her open-minded, dare I say entrepreneurial, spirit has guided her remarkably accomplished career: after rising to the position of editor at The New Yorker, she left for Slate in 2002 to grow its culture section and launch its audio book club. In 2019 she became the editor-in-chief of The Yale Review, which she and her staff transformed from a magazine without a website into an intellectually bold literary magazine for the digital era. Our conversation, which is full of gossip both old and new, explored the dizzying pace at which magazine publishing has evolved over the last two decades and what it will take to keep print alive in the public sphere.

Merve Emre: How do you narrate the way you got from where our students are today to where you are now?

Meghan O’Rourke: I went to Yale as an undergraduate knowing that I loved writing. If it’s not too corny to say, I had a kind of transfiguring experience while writing a short story in high school, where it felt like a vision had descended upon me, and the story, about a teenager with synesthesia, just flowed out of me. I was like, “This is what I have to do. I have to find a way to make writing my job.” But I really had no idea how people became writers.

I grew up in Brooklyn. I would wander down to Community Bookstore in Park Slope and see Paul Auster looking impossibly handsome and European, leafing through books. The gap between me—awkward, sixteen-year-old me—and Paul Auster seemed like a chasm that could never be crossed. In college, I thought I was going to go to grad school for English, to help me become a writer, but I started writing for the Yale Daily News Magazine and serving as an editor on various Yale lit mags, and I fell in love with the communal experience of talking about literature in a way different from the classroom’s. I really liked discussing these objects that were being made and maybe weren’t quite finished. I loved being edited at the Yale Daily News Magazine and the experience of having someone take my words and make them better. That said, I had no idea what to do from there.

During junior year, I started to panic that I had no plans for the summer. It was late February, there was a snowstorm, and I just started googling. I found out that The New Yorker had an internship—a fantastic internship that doesn’t exist anymore. You were assigned to a department called “word processing.” At the time, a lot of the writers still typed their manuscripts. As I recall, writers like Simon Schama and John Updike would print out their manuscripts and fax them to The New Yorker’s office, and I would type up their pieces. It was an incredible kind of training, if you think about it.

Everyone at The New Yorker edited in pencil, from the editors to the so-called page OKers to the infamous Eleanor Gould, who, I believe, helped create the house style we all recognize as The New Yorker’s. In word processing, it was our job, along with typing up manuscripts, to transpose these edits from the page to the digital galleys in our page layout software. As I did that work, I would ask myself, “Why are they making these changes?” I remember watching one fantastic line editor, and initially not understanding exactly why he cut something, and then seeing the edit suddenly bring the passage to life. Making sure that changes were made accurately and there were no typos gave me a training for editing I will never forget.

The last part of that internship, which also came in handy as an editor-to-be, was reading slush, meaning unsolicited manuscripts. I read the poetry and fiction slush. It completely changed my sense of what I was doing as a writer, to read dozens of stories in a day and to think deeply about why any one of them might make me pass it to an editor, which happened maybe three times that summer.

Reading slush at a young age, with the example of other editors around you, how did you hone what you think of as your taste? How important was that in your development as an editor?

Shortly after the internship, I became the assistant to the fiction editor at The New Yorker, and that’s when I really honed my taste. Reading the slush and the wide array of fiction submissions did two things that were very helpful. The first was that I quickly went from being the kind of reader I was in an English seminar—which is to say, attentive to every detail and, if I felt confused or bored, imagining that the problem was me—to being able to say, “If the text isn’t engaging me, maybe the text is not engaging.” It’s an important pivot students can have a hard time making. Certainly I did.

The second thing was that I began to categorize the landscape. One of the most common categories in the slush at that particular time was female, Midwestern, middle-age narrators who were going through a divorce and swimming as a way of coping. In the poetry slush, there were so many poems about forks and spoons—weirdly, no knives. I started to realize that there were two kinds of lyric poems people were submitting: the first was broadly confessional with a kind of epiphanic turn, and the language was really straightforward. The other was this heavily ironized, post–John Ashbery kind of poem. You couldn’t quite make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t quite as sonically rich as an Ashbery poem, but there was just so much of it, and it kept coming.

One of the things an editor has to do, and one of the things we train our students to do in The Yale Review’s editing and publishing courses, is become attuned to the historical moment you’re in and realize this moment is alive and, just like the material you are studying in class, someday it will be history. Magazines are part of the way we mark that history.

I want to ask you a question about editing in pencil. All of my print magazine pieces for The New Yorker are still edited in pencil, and my Web pieces are not. I think it makes a tremendous difference. I’m curious what you learned from seeing edits in pencil, and what, if anything, has been lost or gained by moving away from that?

Sadly, I now edit with Track Changes in Microsoft Word, which is not a program I love. I have a lot of hacks to make it feel more handcrafty. I edit all of my own manuscripts by hand, over and over and over, to the chagrin of my husband, who’s like, “Why are you printing out a manuscript that’s changed microscopically since yesterday?” But it’s the only way I know how to edit my own work.

One of the things we talk about a lot at The Yale Review is that editing is a way of slowing down your thinking, pressing against assumptions, and rechecking moments of insight or lyric flight to make sure they are sound. The handcraft is a way of slowing down. It’s a textured experience. When I’m moving fast through Track Changes, I do worry. To slow it down, I edit, then put the piece aside; then I re-edit it, sometimes from scratch, other times not, but paying close attention to the changes I made, because I always see things that I overdid, or underdid, because the changes can get so messy and you miss a subtlety somewhere.

So now tell us how you honed your taste as the assistant to the fiction editor.

After the internship at The New Yorker, I started subbing in for the editorial assistant to Bill Buford, the fiction editor and also a brilliant nonfiction editor; I eventually took on that role when his assistant left the magazine. Bill had taken a magazine at the University of Cambridge called Granta and made it into something that everybody was talking about and that helped shape the reception of American fiction in the 1980s and 1990s in England. Bill brought that entrepreneurial willingness to every aspect of publishing fiction at The New Yorker. He helped me—as my boss, as my mentor—understand that editing wasn’t just the pencil marks on the page, it was the presentation of the entire issue, and that you have to care as passionately about the art as you do about the writing. You have to care about every headline and what we call the deks, the brief description that runs as a subhead under the title of a piece. You have to care about the captions that run under the illustrations, and the illustrations—they shouldn’t feel too matchy with the fiction, because that would diminish the fiction, or too unrelated to the fiction, because that would feel weird.

I learned from Bill and from Tina Brown, The New Yorker’s editor at the time, how important the mix of any given single issue of a magazine is. In those days, Tina would come in and she would click-clack her stiletto heels down the hall, and every assistant would sit up straight. At a certain point, she would review the fiction issue with us. The layout of the whole magazine would be pinned to the wall. I remember her reviewing the contents of one fiction issue that was really good, but it was a little too dark, like there was something off about it. Tina looked it over and said, “Bill, where are the glitzy bits?” And immediately we were all like, Oh my God, she’s right. The issue was good, but it felt drab and heavy until we changed the mix. That process taught me how commissioning a bright piece of art, altering the order, or adding a lapidary piece of prose and a delicious poem can alter the entire feel of an issue.

My job as the assistant to the fiction editor was to read every single story that came in from an agent, and then write these notes. One of the other editors who read the stories and wrote notes was Roger Angell, a famous, wonderful writer who became a mentor but initially intimidated me—a brilliant mentor, but very scary. You would hear him jingling his change walking down the hall and sit up straight. Everyone’s notes were so brilliant, and I felt like mine were pedestrian. I remember one of the first ones I gave to Bill. He circled some word that I had repeated over and over—I think the word was just—and was like, This isn’t telling me enough about the story, and you’re repeating the same word over and over again. That’s what I credit as the moment I became a critic.

One of the reasons those notes matter is that it’s the space in which you become an advocate for a story, a story you think the magazine should publish.

Do you remember anything you advocated for?

I think Bill began to trust me when he had a really busy week and we had a story fall through, so there was a hole in the issue. We had been sent this very short story, from an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, I believe, by a Dutch writer called Hans Koning. It was about the disappearances in Argentina during the Dirty War—a man gets captured and thrown out of a plane. I read it and thought, I don’t know, this is a little different from what we usually do. It’s very short, it’s much slighter, it’s almost more like a vignette than a big, juicy New Yorker story. But it had something, so I put it in front of Bill, and we published it, I think, the next week. That was the moment I was like, Oh, right, you really can have an impact, even as an assistant, if you have confidence in your own taste.

What happened after The New Yorker and before The Yale Review?

I was at The New Yorker for five or six years, eventually editing nonfiction as well as fiction. When I was officially promoted from assistant to editor, I started editing some of the science and medical writers, which was an absurd act of faith on the part of The New Yorker’s editor, because I had no skills to be editing science writers. But as an editor, you have to be willing to constantly learn, to put on your serious-dilettante hat and get very interested in a subject alongside your writer. It’s a little bit like going on a date. You have to fall in love with that person—or that piece of writing.

Then I went to Slate in 2002. Slate in the 2000s was very much a political magazine modeled on The New Republic. In its very first years, it was a digital magazine that would also get delivered as a stapled printout. A lot of people still didn’t read magazines online; pretty much the only mainstream digital magazines were Salon and Slate. The first editor of Slate, Michael Kinsley, had just resigned, and Jacob Weisberg was taking his place. Jacob wanted to grow Slate’s audience, and he had the correct insight that the way to do that would be to expand its culture coverage. What Mike Kinsley had wanted was, Tell me the one thing I need to know about culture every week. Jake came to me and said, We’re looking for a culture editor. We want someone to build out the culture section.

At Slate, Jake wanted to hire someone who was interested in the future of criticism and how the Internet was going to change it. I thought, well, this is interesting. My job at The New Yorker had been all about honing the skill of not letting a magazine down. The New Yorker has this rich history, and your job as an editor is to uphold that history. But here was a magazine still figuring out its DNA, a place where I would be allowed, and encouraged, to make mistakes—that was very appealing to me. It was not an obvious move though. I could have stayed at The New Yorker, and I would have loved it. But I also wanted to write, and I did find that at The New Yorker it was very hard to balance editing and writing. They were supportive of my doing that, I just could not figure out how.

So Jake offered me the job, and I went. It was a little bit of a dive off the diving board. And it was really the inverse of The New Yorker, where you developed the muscles of giving each piece a thorough going over. I’d get phone calls at 1 AM from copyeditors about the word got versus gotten in a short story; panicked phone calls about a factual error in a piece of fiction that named the “peanut butter chocolate” ice cream sold at a real shop in Montana, but actually that shop only sold “chocolate peanut butter” ice cream. I remember, by contrast, that in one of the first pieces I published at Slate, the headline writers misspelled Allen Ginsberg’s name on the home page “cover.” And it wasn’t a big deal, they just changed it as soon as I told them. The Internet was like that then. We didn’t have a corrections policy when I first arrived at Slate; we just fixed errors as we found them.

What made Slate exciting was that it was all about what criticism was going to be now that the Internet was here, which turned out to be a very important question. One of the things I realized was that criticism had to be far more immediate and voice driven than the criticism I had grown up reading. So I went about building a section of critics. That was really my job at Slate, creating that section. After the first eighteen months, we doubled our monthly visitors, as I recall.

It occurs to me that the two stages of your career—first, figuring out a print magazine with a long tradition, and second, figuring out how to innovate, if we can use that word, at an online publication—come together in the new Yale Review, which you took over as editor in 2019 and redesigned for its two-hundredth anniversary. How did you think about overhauling a journal with such a long and storied history?

When I was asked to apply for the job, I had to write what’s called an editor’s memo. At the time, The Yale Review was a beautiful magazine, but a bit sleepy. I was teaching in the MFA program at New York University, and when I encouraged my students to submit to the Review, they didn’t know about it. I wanted to get the magazine on everybody’s radar. I spent some time reading the Review in its then-current incarnation and previous incarnations. One of the things at its core was that it changed notably with every new editor. That was baked into its identity. The other thing at its core was something really important to me, which was that it published what I call “imaginative literature,” or fiction and poetry—often the best fiction and poetry being written in America and Europe—side by side with some of the most substantial criticism being published anywhere. That criticism was adjacent to the academy but not of the academy. It ran the gamut, from Edith Wharton to Thomas Mann to Harold Bloom to Joyce Carol Oates. The archive is amazing, and rich with possibility and clues about how one might lean on the past to create a very new future.

So I did think explicitly to myself, Okay, this is going be like doing a mix between The New Yorker and Slate. That was something I was quite conscious of. I came in knowing that right away I was going build a website. I also wanted to keep the print magazine, even though Yale suggested we could get rid of print. It’s been really important to me to keep the print along with the digital in a moment when so much print is falling away. Partly for that “handcraft” we talked about, partly because the best reading I’ve ever done has been with an object. But some of the most exciting connecting I’ve done has been through a screen. Connecting to writers, connecting to readers.

The question was, How would these things be unified? I didn’t know the answer, but I started by redesigning the print magazine, with the help of Michael Bierut at Pentagram. I wanted it to feel like an object you would pick up and want to spend luxurious time with, so one of the first things we did was add beautiful images. Having actual art and photographs felt really important to me. I also wanted the page not to feel crowded, so there aren’t too many words on the page. Originally I asked for even fewer words, but then did the math and each issue was going to be like 350 pages, and very expensive to produce. It was a beautiful page design, it was so spare and clean, but I couldn’t afford it.

The website’s and the magazine’s identities were hard to figure out because it was a very crowded field. No one was asking for a new literary magazine, and everybody was already fighting for what we in the industry call “eyeballs.” We had a very tiny budget. It was me and one other person total, and I was part-time. The idea that we could somehow make an inroad into the media landscape seemed implausible, and I knew the only way we could do it was by raising what you might call our table stakes. We were going to need to publish something every week, or ideally several times a week—that was how we were going to make a dent. But there was still the question: What is this magazine? I spent a lot of time thinking about that with the staff and graduate students who were at the Review.

If you imagine the landscape of publishing charted on four quadrants, we might label one axis “Not Curated” to “Heavily Curated.” The Paris Review is heavily curated. The New Yorker is heavily curated. Less curated would be The Huffington Post or The Millions. The other axis is “Disengaged from Readers”—kind of remote, there’s a fourth wall up between the publication and the reader, again like The Paris Review or New Yorker—to “Highly Engaged with Readers,” where that wall is down, as it is in Substacks that feature lots of chats with subscribers, for example, or like Slate or Salon in their early days when editors and writers engaged a lot with active commenters. The quadrant that was really empty was Heavily Curated and Engaged with Readers: approachable and communicative, not withdrawn, not hidden. That was the quadrant I wanted us to be in. It meant thinking about things like having “Yale” in the title, and the ways in which that might be a barrier to entry for people who perceived it as elitist. I persuaded Yale that although we were going to keep the print magazine and charge a subscription for it, we were not going to put a paywall on the website. We were going to stress accessibility. I wanted anybody anywhere in the world to be able to read the latest poetry in The Yale Review, the newest piece of fiction, the piece about abortion rights. And Yale made that possible.

There’s a great quote by a former editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz—there are many things about his editorial approach I don’t agree with, but he said something I often repeat to my students, which is that if a magazine is worth its name, it has to be more than an anthology of pieces. It has to have a point of view. It has to have ideas about discourse. It has to have a sensibility and taste. Once you realize that, you get much more fearless about saying no to things, because it matters less if you’re right and more that you have a consistent idea behind what you’re doing. My idea was that we were going to make space to think deeply and to make juxtapositions with imaginative literature, which never has the “rubbery chew of an op-ed,” as Alexandra Schwartz, your colleague at The New Yorker, once called it. What is it like to put those things next to each other? The result is that the op-ed is refreshed, and the imaginative fiction is made to feel more urgent.

Here are the pieces that are listed in the fall 2023 issue: “Children?,” “Miscarriage in Texas,” “Pregnancy and Risk,” “Ms. at Fifty,” “Emily Wilson’s Iliad,” a collaborative portfolio by Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, and new poems from Brenda Shaughnessy and Gregory Pardlo. When I look at these titles, I see an issue about reproductive justice. When you think about a magazine being more than an anthology of pieces, do you mean that thematically?

The answer is yes and no. There are a lot of thematic literary magazines, and I did not want to put us into a corner while I was still figuring out what this new Yale Review was. Also, Freeman’s and Granta and others were doing themed issues really well. But that said, I think of a magazine like a poem. One of the reasons I love writing poems is that you make meaning through juxtaposition. A magazine is the same. This particular issue you mention was designed right after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. We already had some pieces with themes around reproductive rights, and then we went looking for more. But we didn’t title it our “Reproductive Rights Issue” or our “Abortion Issue.” We just let those connections permeate the pages.

The other way to assemble a magazine issue is to think about making a playlist. You want the glitzy bits; you want the melancholic, brooding moment. You want to hit these different affective feelings and affective registers in each issue. If you have a long, heavy piece, for instance, then maybe you want to put in a grabby poem next. What it’s going to feel like to the reader is something we think about in our editorial meetings.

When I’m talking with young writers or visiting creative writing classes, one thing I mention is that when we reject you, it’s often not about your story’s relative merit, but about how it fits the needs of the magazine right now. This is why you’ll often see in rejections “This isn’t right for us.” It doesn’t mean the piece is bad, or the editor thinks it’s bad, and it’s not a weird, old-fashioned way of saying “We don’t like it.” It actually means that we’re this very specific, quirky, eccentric thing with a temporality, and that, right now, your piece of fiction is not right for us. There’s so much good fiction we turn down that just doesn’t fit into a given issue. And then sometimes you’re simply trying to get enough pages before the next deadline for the printer. There is the reality that at some points you just have what you have, and you’re putting it together. But with a kind of intentionality in making an issue, what happens is you start to notice resonances, you start to see things. Connections often appear, and you’re able to bring those forward.  

How do you distinguish between when it’s you versus when it’s the writer or the piece?

Two important things there. One is that you can’t always be right. Being an editor, a good editor, is relational, which is to say you’re building relationships with writers. You’re building trust. This is one of the reasons that editors love to work with writers over and over again, because you’re learning each other, you’re learning each other’s minds, you’re learning each other’s habits.

The people I get the most nervous about editing are emerging writers. Why? Because when I was editing experienced writers as a baby editor at The New Yorker, someone had the idea of letting me edit a George Saunders story. I don’t know why they did that, but I approached it with a lot of humility. There was a tiny moment when a joke wasn’t quite landing, and I thought my job was to suggest a better joke. So, in pencil, I delicately was like, “Well, maybe this…” George was so kind. He was like, “Well, no… But I see what you mean. How about this?” Then he did a George Saunders thing, and it was a thousand times better than my horrible suggestion. But sometimes when you’re working with emerging writers, they either say no to everything because they think it is their job to protect the text, or they say yes to too much. And part of what I rely on as an editor is the writer saying, “Yes, but let’s do it this way.”

I think it’s very important that editing be a kind of dyad. I don’t think of editing in the top-down, gatekeeper model. That’s not why I do it. An ideal editing experience is that I do a pass, and the writer takes about 70 percent of the edits. A lot of what I’m saying to a writer is, This was what it felt like to read this piece. Is that intentional? If not, what about this? And I do a lot of editing by phone, which slightly horrifies some of my younger staff, but I like to get on the phone and ask the writer to walk me through what they were thinking about.

I always take a first edit over the phone, every single time.

Always. I learn from the writer. And sometimes I have misread things.

I feel quite depressed about the future of print magazines. I think about magazines that historically occupied a similar position to The Yale Review—for instance, Raritan or Salmagundi, which are imperiled. I also feel some impatience with ideas of “timeliness” or the genre of “the take” and the way that they play into the Internet’s attention economy. When you think about the future of The Yale Review, how do you square some of those ideas with the cold, hard realities of what is happening to print?

When I think about print and the future of magazines, we’re facing twin crises. New York Magazine’s recent “Power Issue,” on the media, identifies what happened when magazines and print publishing moved toward the Internet. Magazines used to be able to count on advertising to subsidize and offset a lot of their costs. They didn’t have to pass all the cost onto the consumer. Magazines were slow to realize that things like personal ads were going to be co-opted by Craigslist and that companies were going to be able to see exactly how many people read each piece, how many seconds they spent on each piece, and even how many seconds they spent on certain areas of the page. We can’t do this in quite as much detail at the Review, but at Slate, I could almost see people’s eyeballs. I would get these reports showing where the hot spots were. And you could see where people stopped reading, which was often paragraph three.

We’re in the middle of this long, slow process of figuring out how to salvage an industry. This is a problem of innovation. If you’re slow to understand the scale of change, you are going to lose things, and it’s going to take decades to get them back. I think The New York Times is really figuring that out. They went from paywalls to no paywalls then back to paywalls. Probably paywalls are going to stay for a long time. Other magazines are doing what The Guardian does and what we do, which is appeal directly to the reader. It’s more of the free Substack model: we’re free; if you believe in us, pay for us. This is kind of working for some places, but it only works for a magazine like the Review because we have an endowment and are supported by a university like Yale, which doesn’t charge us rent.

I think a parallel question is whether or not universities will continue to support magazines. Universities once valued these magazines, partly as a kind of cold war propaganda, but also—and this is where I get earnest—as a real instantiation of all that’s excellent about the academy, as a model of discourse and how all the knowledge, all the thoughtfulness that’s inherent in a liberal arts education, in the history of learning, is present in a marketplace of ideas and literature. I do feel quite passionately that universities and colleges should invest in saving these precious resources while they still exist. I hope that The Yale Review will be an example of how publishing can go hand in hand with teaching.