Merve Emre interviews eleven editors
| In “The Art of Editing,” season two of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre speaks with editors from magazines, newspapers, and book imprints to discuss their careers and the day-to-day work that goes into producing poetry and prose. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode. The season concluded this month with its eleventh episode, an interview with Leo Carey, a senior editor at The New Yorker. Below, we’ve collected the full season of conversations with editors, fact-checkers, and writers who have worked everywhere from Vanity Fair to The New York Review, Simon and Schuster to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Moscow to New York. “It’s very rewarding as an editor when you identify a problem, give a suggestion, and then the writer doesn’t do it but the thing they do is better. That’s really fun. And that happens, often and occasionally, in ways that sort of end up being really quite memorable.” “[Music producers and editors] understand themselves as contributing to the work as opposed to sanctioning or validating the work. The editor comes in with the assumption that what a writer is working on is already a valid thing. So, they’re getting you to interrogate and become aware of decisions that for many writers, at least for me at the time, were largely unconscious.” “So much of editing is about clocking your own experience as a consumer of the thing and being hyper-alert to the feelings that you’re having, then being able to communicate those feelings as notes to the person who made it.” “I learned this sense of trust that the writer’s mind is the thing you’re cultivating and valuing above all. Yes, you have to kind of shape it to the needs of a publication, but there’s some essential spirit of the writer that you’re trying to harness and relate to and encourage.” “You get a pretty thick skin after a while. You have to become comfortable with the fact that when you’re in a role where you’re making decisions that have that kind of impact, the job is not to try to anticipate everybody’s tastes and please them. That will never happen, it’s an exercise in futility. The job is to learn to trust your own taste and also learn to embrace the fact that you can maybe move that needle.” “If you don’t have space to help nurture younger people, they’re not going to stay.” “This is going to sound schmaltzy, but it should be a collaboration, right? I do think there’s a misapprehension that the fact-checker is coming in to slash and burn your piece. That’s certainly not how the approach should be.” “When I’m acquiring something, I need to be so obsessed with it that I don’t shut up about it, because my job for the next one to five years will be to basically be the only advocate for this author and for this book. I have to be completely ready to, as they say, risk it all for my books.” “One of the things an editor has to do 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’m most interested in the kinds of ideas that appeal to novelists, the ones where there is no real resolution, the ones open to interpretation.” “I still struggle to think of The New York Review as my magazine, because I think of it so much as our magazine…. It was very clear to me, as the kind of little guy that I am, that what was needed was for the magazine to be cracked open. It was a process of glasnost and perestroika, I always say.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back. Special Offer
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