Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: Megan O’Rourke is a poet and a memoirist and a best-selling, award-winning author who also happens to be my neighbor. She’s 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 just gossip, or pose a crazy impractical scheme like opening an honest to God independent bookstore in our college town. Her entrepreneurial spirit has guided her remarkably accomplished career.
Megan was an editor at The New Yorker before leaving for Slate in 2001 to grow its culture section and launch its audio book club. Then in 2020, she became the editor-in-chief of The Yale Review, which she and her staff have transformed into an award-winning and accessible literary magazine for the digital era. Our conversation, which is full of both old and new gossip, explored the dizzying pace at which magazine publishing has evolved over the last two decades and what it will take to keep print alive.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Meghan O’Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.