(Stephen Burt, Brian Evenson, Karen Long, Eric Lorberer, Rusty Morrison) The ethical boundaries of book reviewing in an age when everyone has "friended" everyone else can be fuzzy. How do we define, avoid, or accept "conflict of interest" as methodologies and technologies change? This panel, made up of authors, reviewers, and small press publishers, will grapple with the dilemmas of the current world of book reviewing, discuss ways out of the coterie vs. "objective" binary, and hash out some ideas to make reviewing more transparent, honest, and useful in the future.

Published Date: March 16, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Steven Bur, Brian Evanson, Karen Long, Eric Lobert, and Rusty Morrison. You'll now hear Eric Lobert provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us. 9:00 AM always a little tricky. I know some of us up here are a little tired as well, but very happy to be with you and talking about our subject today, the ethics of book reviewing. I'm Eric Lorber. I'm the editor of Brain Taxi Review of Books. We're turning 20 this year, which has kind of snuck up on us. I proposed this panel because I noticed, I mean, over the years I've been on lots of book reviewing panels. They've all been great actually, and it's been wonderful to see the growing interest in this particular segment of the field, but so many of them focus on more practical elements, which again is great, but I found myself yearning for some more obstru material, some philosophy, and because we deal with ethical matters quite frequently, we assess our ethical guidelines yearly as a board.

Speaker 2 (01:25):

I should say we're a nonprofit book review, so that might be a factor in that I thought it would be a really interesting prospect and gathered some comrades, all of whom I admire and all of whom have different relationships to the book review field. Some of them have written for Rain Taxi and many other publications, and also between them they represent fields such as teaching, publishing, working at large newspapers, foundations, and reading series, all sorts of other activities, which I think is important because reviewing in my mind is not a monoculture and that's one of its strengths. At any rate, I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves and maybe in light of what I just said, talk about your various subject positions in addition to reviewing. Hi,

Speaker 3 (02:21):

Thank you for coming out here. I'm Steven Burt, also Stephanie, same person, and I do a lot of things related to book reviewing. I review a lot of poetry, some graphic novels and comics and fiction and academic and non-academic lit QuickBooks. I also teach, I write poetry books. I teach at Harvard. I taught at McAllister College in Minnesota before that, and I think that may be all you need to know. I'm proud to be a rain taxi writer.

Speaker 4 (02:48):

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for coming out. I am happy and flattered to be with you today and I'm looking forward especially to when you start to speak, so we'll try to get there quickly. I was book editor for eight years of the Plane dealer, the newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. I write now for a variety of outlets. I also manage the Anis Field Wolf Book awards, which are the only juried prize in our country for books that look at racism and think about diversity.

Speaker 2 (03:23):

Yes, thank you and thank you for being with us. Karen. I should say that in your programs it might say that Carolyn Kellogg was scheduled to be here. She couldn't make it, and Karen graciously agreed to you. Pinch hit at the last minute. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (03:38):

Hi, I'm Rusty Morrison. It's great to see everyone here at 9:00 AM which feels like 4:00 AM somehow this panel time. I'm delighted to be a writer for Rain Taxi. Rain Taxi is one of the most amazing review organs that we have. I've been a publisher since 2001, co-publishing Omni Don with my husband Ken Keegan, and I also am a poet and I have a number of books that other people have published of mine and I also write critical essays and think about writing and poetry and ideas from not just the reviewer position, but also from the position of the thoughtful engager with the ideas.

Speaker 6 (04:24):

I'm Brian Evanson. I am currently a professor at Brown University, just accepted the job at Cal Arts, so Levy Brown. I have reviewed a number of different places. I used to when I was young, I used to review as much as I could so that I could just get books. I couldn't afford books and that was a great way to get books. Now I don't do quite as many, but review it, rain taxi, various other places and have the luxury at this point of just choosing books I'd really like to see reviewed.

Speaker 2 (04:51):

Great. I think you're getting a hint of some of the meat that we hope to dig into today. One of our key tenets actually is that we try to think of reviewing as not a top down profession. So in that spirit, I always try to engage reviewers in decision-making processes and to try to learn from them, to hear from them what their concerns are. So I asked each of the people here today to just give a brief talk about their vantage of the topic, and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing it. Maybe we can start with you, Steve.

Speaker 3 (05:27):

Am I first? Yeah, am I first? Okay. I want to help us think about conflicts in general about conflict of interest in book reviewing and why they never go away. And I want to do a diagram. Imagine a universe in which there are five people and they all write books and they're the only people who can write books on this topic because it's quite an obscure topic. Let's say Acadian inscriptions, Acadian with a K, ancient sumaria, that stuff. And they're only only people qualified to review each other's books. They're the only people who understand what's going on. It doesn't matter that they all go to the same cocktail parties because no one else can do this in that situation. No one really needs to worry about conflicts of interest. All they need to worry about is not lying in print, just saying things they believe and the only people who can catch them are the other four.

Speaker 3 (06:18):

So that's a situation where conflict of interest aren't something that should keep anyone up at night because there's no way to get outside the circle. Now imagine another universe in which there are millions and millions of people like the stars in the night sky, all of whom are wonderful writers and are perfectly qualified to review any book on a given topic. In that situation, conflict of interest also do not arise because if you're the editor, let's say you're Karen, I'm not going to sketch Karen, imagine Karen assigning books or Eric assigning books. You have no problem finding someone to review a book who's a beautiful writer, meets deadlines is perfectly qualified. We'll understand exactly what's going on and we'll have no connection to the author or the publisher or the career shape that involves future interactions with that author or that publisher in that universe, conflict of interest also do not arise.

Speaker 3 (07:08):

The problem is that in almost every sector, maybe every sector of the literary world, we live in between those two worlds. And if you are the assigning editor, you have to decide how close you want the reviewer to be able to be to the author of the topic, the publisher, and what rules you have to have. And if we keep that in mind, we can see why almost every journal that I've written for and almost every assigning editor that I've worked with has had slightly different rules. There are many, many kinds of rules you can have, and I want to go into this topic by remembering that this is a problem that has no one solution. Maybe that's all for now.

Speaker 4 (07:53):

Wonderful. I'd just like to take you for coffee and call it a day. I want to start with a story since we all like those. I was outside the doors yesterday. I ran into a friend, a novelist and a critic, and she and I discovered in the first couple minutes we had both just reviewed Tony Morrison's new novel, God Help the Child for Eastern Publications. So immediately we did the animal thing of scanning each other's faces and exhaled that we had come out on the same note, minor Morrison, and then she said she doubled down. I wish people would learn to go out on top. And I said, did you say that?

Speaker 4 (08:45):

And her startle reflex, you could see from the last seat in the auditorium. And the question then is, did I say that? Well, I don't think that, I think Minor Morrison is better than 90% of major everybody else, almost everybody else. What I did say though was that passages in the book had a romance novel worthy quality. And I quote it to back it up, and I use this example not to excoriate my friend, I'd use it if she were here, but to say ethics are fascinating and they are always in play her decisions not to tell exactly what she thought. I have a problem with that as an assigning editor, my ideal reviewer pretty much says what they would confide in a friend or at the dinner table and what you can argue with that, but the good part of that is there is an argument and it should be had between the editor and the critic.

Speaker 4 (09:55):

And she did in fact get feedback from her editor who said, wow, you didn't love this, so she didn't come out and say it, but she communicated it and that might be all the editor wants because the editor also may not want to piss off the Godhead. So I come to you out of the Roman Catholic herd, so my mind works that way, and this is to me very minor what my friend was practicing. I wouldn't even say it rises to the level of venial sin. What is a venial sin in my world is to, I've had critics write specifically to get their names planted on the back of that paperback. They want to be quoted, they want their names circulated. Steve just made a noise that indicates he might elevate that to a mortal sin.

Speaker 4 (10:50):

But for me, because I like the gravitas of mortal, those sins, I would boil down to blood, marriage, sex and money. And the idea is you better talk to me and you better talk to yourself about any of those connective tissues between you and the author, their agent, their editor and their publishing house. So if a brother-in-law figures in there, if you've been sleeping or have slept with people in that universe, if you work for or have had them work for you, the money piece that is up in the disqualifying realm and definitely the revealing realm, and I think I'll wrap up my intro by saying one of the great ideas Eric had was how do we talk about these things in the shifting landscapes of where we read our criticism?

Speaker 4 (11:53):

I think that the goals of the good of transparency and owning our connections, which aren't bad but should be explicit, start by not doing it alone. There's that bit in Matthew about not seeing the moat in your own eye, concentrating on the moat in your brother's eye when you have a log in your own. And I keep coming back to that image when it comes to the way we call each other on our conflicts. And what I think about when I think about reading in the wild web is who's editing, who's having that conversation? And there's many reasons we all find ourselves reading the New Yorker, but one of those reasons I argue is the fact checking. When Lawrence Wright had his first Scientology article, it took six months of fact checking and I want to read things that have more than one brilliant mind engaged and also have some cops involved, but then I grew up Catholic.

Speaker 7 (13:06):

Thank you. You can keep that, Brian. Thank

Speaker 8 (13:09):

You. Sure.

Speaker 6 (13:13):

I mean I do think that unless you're actually thinking about it closely and carefully, that you can convince yourself that you're engaged in ethical reviewing practices even when you're not, at least not completely. I do think the best editors are really good at calling you on things and talking about conflicts and making it aware. I do have friends who feel like if the editor doesn't ask them if they have a conflict, it's okay for them to go ahead and write the review that they probably shouldn't write. But I think I'm going to talk about two different things I guess just to begin with. And the first involves something that the others have talked about a little bit, and that's the question of the closeness of the person you're reviewing and whether or not you should review friends. I think it's easy to justify this even when it probably shouldn't be justified in the literary world, if you're even moderately aware, you're probably only a step or two away from any other writers.

Speaker 6 (14:08):

Instead of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, it's more like two degrees from George Saunders. The hard thing I think is that in the literary world, you're often friends with people because you admire their work. In addition, you want to review people you admire because attention to certain kinds of books helps make a space for a certain sort of literature within the literary landscape. I think the most difficult question if you're both a reviewer and a writer, is to what degree your job is to review books in an objective fashion and to what degree your task is to shape literary culture using whatever materials you have on hand. I personally don't think you should review your friends that people you see regularly or email with regularly or have slept with or whatever, even if they're good writers should just be off limits. But where it gets tricky I think, is when you start talking about acquaintances, people you've met a couple of times at a conference, people on Facebook, how close you are to what those people and at what point you can or can't be objective is a really complicated question.

Speaker 6 (15:10):

Are former students okay if they've been out long enough, where do you draw the line? I don't think there's a correct place to draw the line, but again, if you don't think about it in regard to particular cases of things you're reviewing or if you kind of repress it, the line will draw itself for you in a way that's blurred and potentially problematic. I think what happens is that you think you're doing one thing when in fact you're doing another as a result of that. The second thing I want to talk about briefly is just involves reviewing in a way that doesn't dismiss in advance people whose subjects positions are different from your own. And this to me is a big one and one that we need to keep referring to and keep being reminded of. I think if we don't make an effort to read widely and to move outside of our normal patterns of reading, we slip very quickly into ruts.

Speaker 6 (16:01):

And I do think that organizations like Vita do a tremendous service in this regard. For instance, by making transparent the ratios of male to female publications of various kinds and different venues. I think it's important to take that kind of inventory of your own work as reviewer periodically. And I do understand that this can be complicated and that reviews are assigned, they're often assigned to you because of people's sense of your expertise. There's a reason I think that organizations like Vita tend to focus on publications rather than targeting individual reviewers, but editors do take suggestions as well, and I think we need to be aware of when our reviewing or our individual reading is not only limiting us, but reinforcing a false perception of the monochromatic nature of the literary world or encouraging a literary hierarchy that submits to outmoded notions of gender and at different moments, I think I've been good or bad about this, and this is the thing is I think you have to constantly have this conversation with yourself.

Speaker 6 (16:58):

You don't. I think the fact that Rain Taxi has a yearly review of their practices and the ethics of their practices is an incredible thing and it's something I think that reviewers themselves should do. I've had years where if you'd asked me if I'd reviewed roughly equal numbers of male and female writers, I would've said yes and then go back and look at it and realize, no, I actually reviewed a lot more male writers and I can't and shouldn't really blame this on what the magazine editors wanted. It's just something that once you get fixated on certain kinds of things, there's years where I've been really interested in reviewing international literature and stop thinking about other sorts of things. When I was a very young writer back in my early twenties, I was lucky to stumble across a Zimbabwean writer named Debut Erra. He's a remarkable writer, really fierce in a number of ways, and he said something in a short article that I've thought about a lot since, which is that while writers do exist in nations and ethnicities and genders and other groups of various kinds, they also and even primarily exist altogether as a kind of country of writers.

Speaker 6 (18:08):

I think if you believe that then reading or reviewing only white male writers is a little bit like going to a new city and only eating at Denny's because you're comfortable there. If we stay in our ruts as readers and reviewers, we stay in our ruts as writers as well, and I think we end up missing a lot of great work that we'd otherwise come across. And as reviewers, whether we have a project or not, we need to take serious and real risk that take us outside of our limited sphere.

Speaker 5 (18:37):

So I too will start with a little story and then I'll explain why it's relevant to reviewing in case it's a little obscure. So I'm in a reading group with a few very smart writers and critics and we study poems for pleasure and insight and it's led by a very smart scholar poet. I won't mention her name because she might be embarrassed by the story I'm about to tell, although I hold her in even higher esteem because of what happened in the group. She'd brought in a poem for discussion less than a page, and during the two hours of our very enthusiastic discussion of the piece, our interpretation of the form's impact on subject matter and how it yielded content in the poem, everyone experienced and expressed to the group at least once if not more often, that we each were having our own particular certainties about a particular aspect of the poem entirely disrupted because of what someone else said about the work.

Speaker 5 (19:37):

That doesn't mean that any of us saw our initiating position as made wrong by the other people in conversation, but that we rather found that the poem continued to mean more to us in a more complex way than we had seen alone. In an email conversation the next day with the leader, she said to me, I respect the poem even more now after last night, but I still don't fully understand it and I love her for saying that to me. She's the kind of critic that I wouldn't expect to hear that from, but she too often in the conversation in the group said, I hadn't seen that. I hadn't seen that with that quick shake of the head, and it was an amazing two hours for me. I know what she meant. She can't say that she understands it entirely, but that's not because the poem was a difficult poem.

Speaker 5 (20:32):

I want to underline that it wasn't something that you would read and say initially, I don't understand the syntax or I don't follow the meaning. The meaning was clear on the surface level, but more and more came forward in the interplay of sound and sense in the interplay of form and function as we talked about it and as we started to ask ourselves what understanding meant to us and that we could enlarge that frame for ourselves in conversation with each other, I was reminded that I come to poetry and to other forms of literature to have exactly that experience, to find more than I initially expect to experience something that exceeds my grasp and to become more limber in my intellectual and emotional reach When I read the work, there are many studies of brain activity that account how when we read literature that gives us insight, they register a new pattern of neural activity, new pathways are actually created and once a restructuring occurs, it never disappears.

Speaker 5 (21:36):

We can lose track of it by not operating within it, but it's always there for us. And what I believe about literature is that it teaches us to step certain kinds of literature. Literature that lead us to insight will actually teach us how to create more of those neural connections or synapses and that perhaps that might even help us in our day-to-day lives when we're up against an impossible or seemingly insoluble problem that if we push a little harder in that way that we've learned without even being able to logically understand it, that change can happen. And that's what I felt in community or in conversation with those other writers. So what does this have to do with book reviewing? Since my primary work is a publisher of poetry and not a reviewer, I'm very lucky in that I have the chance to choose what I review and I see choice as the first ethical issue, which is really what we've been talking about here.

Speaker 5 (22:37):

I trust that the others on this panel, which I've heard, I've already talked about other aspects of choice, but I want to talk about a choice that may seem very obvious, which is the choice regarding whether I completely understand the work and if I'm willing to review work that is continuing to defy my understanding and yet I want to talk about that nonetheless with an audience. It's also to be absolutely honest with you why I choose books for Omni Don if on the level of line or on the level of actually arc of the book, there's more there than I first real. I first believe and I feel it, I sense it. There's an experience of insight that by reading and reading the book, I continue to have, that's the work I want to review and that's actually the work that we want to publish.

Speaker 5 (23:30):

By this, I do not mean incomprehensible work, but I do mean that I experienced the work as creating a visceral thrill for me and in that sense, charged with insight. I know that's not a logical criteria. I can't map it. I wish I could do that with the markers on the board, but that is not in my ability level. But studies have shown that the brain does register emotional responses before we figure out logically what something means to us. Anri Bergson talks about how when we hear a joke, we laugh first a complicated joke and then later we realize we have to figure out what was funny about it to us. So I think of that laugh or that I call it tingle that I look for when I read a priest of literature, whether it's fiction or prose poetry is all that I review.

Speaker 5 (24:26):

For the most part, I have reviewed a little bit of philosophy, but primarily it's that sharp moment of surprise that I look for and that stays with me and those are the pieces of work that I want to review and that I want to publish. I know that there's always something ineffable in that physical experience, something outside logic, and as I have recounted in my experience in that reading group, I trust that every reader may see the work from a different vantage and arrive at a differently, but I think that what's most important to me is I'm looking for work that demonstrates to me that there is always more to me than I expect Rebecca Solnit. In a discussion of Virginia Wolfe's critical voice suggests that wolf celebrates what she examines by insisting on its multiplicity in her writing, insisting on its irreducible and its mystery.

Speaker 5 (25:22):

Its mystery is to her the capacity of something that keeps becoming. I'm not suggesting that the Wiley critic should find and create meaning in a work and that the Wiley critic should be able to do that, rather that I think that in the work there is a sense of the other that I'm continually seeking. This means for me that I'm willing to choose to review works that defy my first level of understanding and that's frightening. Rosalyn de pros in her text, corporeal generosity tells us that in assuming that the other is the same one reduces the other to the self and to do so. And here she quotes Nietzsche deliberately and recklessly brushes the dust off the wings of the butterfly. That is this moment she goes on to suggest that to offer generosity is to begin with the risk and the admission that one must not expect from any statement of the other that we will get it right.

Speaker 5 (26:27):

Last week I was delighted to read a reviewer who mid essay stated, this work is the hardest of all this writer's work to describe. I don't know if I can do it. I was thrilled. And then he does go on to attempt with all of his skill a description of what remains ultimately inexplicable. Giorgio ban. In his text, nudity proposes that the articulation of a zone of non knowledge is the condition and at the same time the touchstone of all of our knowledge. Of course, Aban tells us that there are plenty of ways and we know it, that not knowing can lead us to clumsiness and ugliness and fool heartiness, but such carelessness and inattention abounds. Instead, what we are looking for is to find a careful and attentive way of striving toward what we are unable to know. A gamin proposes that the art of living, and I'll add the art of reviewing, is the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship to that which escapes us. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (27:40):

Thank you all so much. I think as I hope you can tell, I sort of feel like we've tried to unroll a carpet and show that there are some patterns, emerging hints of them anyway, and that they could go on for quite a while. The connective tissue that jumps to my mind and that I actually think about quite frequently is that we're talking about relationships between people, that this is not some kind of scientific enterprise, but that real people are doing the work on all ends of the equation. And I wonder, first of all if that's ever a factor, like sort of the reality, the material reality of these people,

Speaker 3 (28:24):

Everything is in a relationship with everything else. The rubric for this panel, which is sort of broader than I might've thought, runs from the sort of great reading list that Rusty was giving us from a kind of post niche or post Hagar ethics. I almost, I don't dunno if Levinas was in the longer version of that, is Emmanuel Levinas in there somewhere? Yeah, Sian ethics of openness to the other and of has what I didn't

Speaker 5 (28:53):

Quote Lenos, but he's

Speaker 3 (28:55):

In this book. Okay, you almost did. Okay. This is if you don't know the French philosopher Emmanuel Lenos of openness to the otherness of the other, which should affect us as writers and as critics and is for Lenos specifically ethical consideration requirement. Really, although some of Levinas, it's a requirement that no actual human being can completely fulfill all the way over to am I conflicted out of reviewing the latest volume of poetry by my cousin's college roommate or by an editor who paid me $200 to review something else 10 years ago. And those seem like they should be entirely separate kinds of questions, but one of the things that we're already seeing is that maybe they're not, and that's why the first kind of question is so hard to get your head around. And the second is so unexpectedly hard to answer because every encounter that we have with a work of literature, and really if you think about the impulse to make things concrete, to give examples, to give telling adjectives, to give symbols for most of the kinds of literary writing that we do, every kind of abstract relation to the world that we can imagine or feel has to be concretized to be memorable.

Speaker 3 (30:17):

And when you concretize something, you're putting it into a world of material stuff and people with histories, which also means people who need to make a living and need to eat and often not always have places to live and need money. And the reason it's so hard to come up with, to get back to the practical side, a code of ethics for book reviewer is the reason no one will ever come up with such a thing in a way that gives practical guidance to all reviewers in all circumstances is that every encounter with a book that you have takes place under different circumstances, both in terms of your taste and the book's aesthetics and the book's larger goals and in terms of where you and the book and the commissioning editor and the publisher are in a world of honestly money and other practical stuff. So everything is related to everything else. What is it? Is it James really truly relations stop nowhere, I think. Yeah, that's James right relations stop nowhere.

Speaker 2 (31:13):

Well said. Thank you, Steve. The other thing that really came up for me in these talks that I wanted to delve into was the realm of the reviewer's agency desire, what Rusty called choice and maybe what Brian referred to as a sort of self challenge. And because reviewing happens on a spectrum of assigning to a sort of passionate fervor, that's a complicated matter too. Simply because I can, we're here, I kind of want to ask just some sort of very plain blunt questions, but for example, Karen, did you want to review the Morrison? Were you eager to do it? Were you personally invested before the assignment

Speaker 4 (32:00):

In it? Of course, of course. Who doesn't want to sit at the big kid table? And I don't think neutral is what anyone is going for. I think that's that idea of objectivity and just the facts ma'am is the first thing to set aside. And when I listen to the other panelists first I want to take a course with everybody, but second, I do think we're all aware in our own lives of log rolling back scratching brown-nosing revenge, we can all pull examples and those are the things we can't pretend because we're about these higher angels of experiencing otherness in people's writing aren't grubbing into the room. And so I like to think people are mysterious and it's a great way to approach people because it's respectful and one can't know what's on another's heart. So my standards boil down to the appearance of a conflict. You may be able to review your brother-in-law and write like an angel, but that appearance wrecks it for me.

Speaker 2 (33:22):

Right? Let me zero in a little bit on that. Why did you want to review Tony Morrison

Speaker 4 (33:32):

Respect engagement with her Canon interest in why she matters more internationally than nationally? I do the work with Annas Field Wolfe, so she's won our prize and I'm drawn to generational things that one can see in her writing. So I had those higher level reasons, but the Grubbier reason to return is I also want to matter in this universe and one way I do is putting my voice into it.

Speaker 2 (34:11):

And so what I love about that answer is to me it illuminates the person behind the category of reviewer. And not that that needs to be illuminated in the moment, but I think it is in the background. I mean, it's obviously in the background and it might be a point of reflection that we'd do better to engage more often. Let me ask the opposite question, since we have people on the panel who are both reviewers and in the period when they have new books of being reviewed, I should probably take this moment to issue this shameless plug that here at a w p, we've just released a new chatbook in our series by Steven Bird called All Season Stephanie. We're very proud of that. So Steve, as an author, why do you want to be reviewed? And lemme just also say, I hear the phrase, I would love it if you'd review my book. Oh God, a staggering number of times per week. So I'm really for the first time getting past, okay, why

Speaker 3 (35:22):

Is this? This is for me first. Okay, sure. I like attention. I'd say most literary writers possibly most people like attention. I want more people to read things that I write. And book reviews are a way of calling attention to work even in a sort of neutral or faintly positive description. Even a well done attack can call attention to the work in a way that maybe gets it in front of some more people who might like it. There's also the further pleasure of having someone get what you're trying to do. The last time I had a big sort of full length book of poetry out was 2013, and there were two pieces about it and about me that really stuck in my mind. One of them was a piece in the Canadian Journal open letter by the poet Kirsten Kock who got everything. Is she here?

Speaker 3 (36:19):

I don't think she's here. And I really felt like no one who had written about me felt that it was worth spending all that time and got everything and it was really moved and sent her an email. I had never heard of her before and now I've read some of her work. I don't know if that means I'm conflicted out of writing about her forever. For the Times book review, for example, it would be for the plane dealer, it would be for other venues. I might not be. And you can see why not, because if I want Jane Doe to someday write about me, then I should never write about her. And you see why, if that's a rule that all editors follow, it really puts a kibosh on a lot of criticism that we would like to have in the world. That's a digression.

Speaker 3 (37:02):

The other review of Belmont, my last book of poetry that came out that really maybe notice was an attack, it was a long piece in the New Republic saying that I wasn't a very good poet and as a critic I had no standards because they had no philosophical program on which I evaluated things in terms of good or bad. I wasn't RRP Acker for example, or Matthew Arnold, and I'm not those people and that's okay with me. And this was a piece that called me a fanboy and the boy thing I have some problems with, but the fan, yeah, and this was a very sharp critic who may also be here who understood what I was trying to do and didn't like it. And that was really fun to be quarreled with in a way that was oppositional but thoughtful. And I liked getting that kind of attention too.

Speaker 2 (37:51):

Thank you for your honesty. And I do want to again call out a couple of key things for me anyway. One of the things we do at Rain Taxi actually is work with emerging reviewers, I guess I would say younger people who are trying to break into the field and we feel it's incumbent on us to give them some instruction and encouragement. And one of the things we find ourselves frequently guiding them to do is to look at what a work is trying to do in Steve's phrase rather than what it might accomplish. Most people when they switch the gear realize it's a different task. And I think a more useful one for a literary conversation. Rusty, as a publisher, do you take this issue of what happens when the review? I'm sure there's the mythical feeling that review and the bad review, and do they sell more books, do they not? And how does it interface with the books potential as an object in the world?

Speaker 5 (38:54):

It's crucial to us that we see the books reviewed in the world and we consider it part of our curatorial function to get the books into as many reviewers hands as possible. Whether or not those reviewers are going to be entirely positive, neutral, not read the book, use it as a doorstop. It's our job to get the book to the reviewer. And we also think it's our job to, we include an interview with the author that I do so that there's some conversation between the publisher and the author, which the reviewer can completely ignore or not. I mean, and that's an ethical question. Should I do that? Should I provide some ground for the work? Yes, you should. Oh, good. I love an answer. We're solving all your problems. I feel it's important that the reviewer have choice in this regard and maybe disagree with some of the things that the author has said, but I've seen some of that conversation come into reviews in a useful anecdotal way.

Speaker 5 (39:55):

But one story I want to tell, which I actually told to you over dinner a couple of nights ago, is that we offer our books by query first to a SCAD billion reviewers. If you basically come up to the Omni Don table and say, I'm interested in reviewing your books, we will put you on our query list and we will ask you if you'd like any of these books this season. We don't as a rule, send books to everybody, just send them out. But we ask first. And because we ask, we are told, we're just told in the last season, I'm interested in seeing a couple of those books, but one of them I want to see because I really don't think I'm going to like that book, and I honestly think I may write a review criticizing that work. And so we had about a two minute conversation.

Speaker 5 (40:43):

First of all, we were shocked in a delighted way at the candor of this reviewer. And then we thought, there's no way in the world we wouldn't send that book because we are not going to hide our work from a reviewer who is maybe going to be critical. And if that review comes out, will that review? And I honestly think that it's an open question because a book may get five or six reviews and one negative one. So how are we to judge? Did that negative review help the book or did it hurt the book when you're looking at all these other factors, but in terms of being a publisher, are we open to negative reviews? We're open to the book being seen and read in as honest way as possible by the community. And if there are some criticism and some positive things, then we feel that the readers will get a chance to take a close look at it as a writer.

Speaker 5 (41:35):

Can I just say one little story? One of my books was finally reviewed in a longer piece in Poetry Magazine. I won't say the Reviewer. And there were four or five other poets reviewed in the piece. I think it was four of us. And of the four people reviewed, I think I was the most negatively reviewed. My friend may disagree with me about how negative it was. We read it together. And that's also an interesting thing. If you're the writer and you read a review of your work, I don't know if you're anything like me, you'll see every little thing is, oh, they hated it. They hated it. But what the reviewer basically said is there's a lot of terrific lines here, but it really, does the book actually mean anything? Probably not, which just killed me. But then I thought, this is a reviewer who's looking for a different kind of work. As Steven was said, this reviewer saw very intuitively or very insightfully what I was trying to do line by line, but didn't like the way I didn't pull it together in a coherent fashion. So I'm not going to change my writing style, but it was a really interesting thing to see how someone can see you so clearly and disagree with you.

Speaker 2 (42:48):

And actually, I'm going to tell a little anecdote that popped into my head, but I remember several years ago, and this really speaks to ethics in a broader sense, I think, and to the human purpose behind the enterprise of reviewing. But I remember you and I were discussing some potential poetry books that you might review, and at the time you had a death in the family, and we began to talk about poets whose work dealt with death and loss. And it became very important for you to write about that at that moment. And that really, it was a stark lesson in this matters on a level beyond chatting about a book or talking it up or there is something that happens in the process that is essentially emotional and humanistic.

Speaker 5 (43:39):

That review that I wrote for Rain Taxi helped me grieve that death in a way that I could not have grieved it in any other way. It was an incredibly moving experience to write deeply about death in a book that wasn't my direct experience, but that I could take into the aesthetic realm, which is really an opportunity to take into a more spiritual or philosophical realm and take the issues of death apart and look at how a writer changes me in my thinking. And so I'm really grateful that Rain Taxi gave me that opportunity. It helped me enormously.

Speaker 2 (44:14):

Thank you. And I think it helped others. Brian, as the fiction writer on the panel, you have received more reviews of your work. And I'm curious, first of all, because you read widely, because you read in other languages because you translate yourself. And so you're seeing, I think a discrepancy genre wise. I'm curious if you have any sort of feeling about, you talked about the diversity challenges that it's incumbent on us all to sort of ask those questions, but even into the more aesthetic realms, do you see things being paid attention, not enough attention?

Speaker 6 (44:50):

Yeah, I think there's always things that get more attention than other things. I want to very briefly go back to what Rusty was saying. I do think that the publisher, the ethics of publishing is you give as much material as you can to make the book succeed. And then if the editor of the magazine wants to take that out before they send it to the writer, that's fine. So look, I suppose if you're sending it directly to the potential review writer, that's another issue. But I still think it's like that's the most ethical thing as a publisher to do.

Speaker 6 (45:24):

And the other thing I want to say is I've always heard that a good negative review in the New York Times sells more books than a positive review. I've never been able to quite verify that, but I like believing that that's true. But yeah, I think it's a complicated issue in fiction. For me, it's complicated as a writer because I write work that's kind of has one foot in literature and one foot in genre, and people either get that or they just don't get it. And so when I get a negative review, it often just doesn't get it. It says, this is not a literary book, or this is not a genre book. And ultimately I don't find that very useful for me as a writer. I don't think it's that useful for readers as well. I love negative reviews that are smart. I think it's much harder to write negative reviews that are smart than to write hatchet jobs or something that really reveals the bias of the review writer. But when you get those, they're things that really stick with you as a writer. And then I also think that you can start to see the biases of certain reviewers if you begin to follow them and expect what you see, what they're interested in, what they expect. And in fact, there are reviewers that when I see their review and I kind of know if I'm going to like that book or not, depending on what they say.

Speaker 2 (46:43):

Yeah. Thank you. I think now would be a great time to open it up to your questions. We'll prepare for you to diverge and pick up any of these threads or go with any of your own. I'll try to repeat the question I guess for the recording. Yes, sure. Okay. So we have a two-part question. Freelance reviewer, not getting a chance to have a deep relationship with one editor. How does that create self-monitoring challenges? And then also in the world of social media in which we are all friends with each other, how does that affect the conflict?

Speaker 3 (47:26):

If you keep doing this, you will develop with editors plural. It's quite unusual in today's world of being paid badly for things for someone who's primarily a book reviewer to be exclusive to one journal. I think there's certain people who are on staff at the New York Times where that's the case, but that's quite unusual. So keep doing this and assuming that editors like your work, which I hope they do, you will develop these ongoing relationships and then the editors will, I hope ask you. And the more money involved, the more obligated they are and the more likely, in my experience they are to actually ask you, have you met this person? How well do you know this person? Have they written you a check? Now, if you do that for yourself because the editors are new to you and they're not doing it to you, you should ask yourself what they would be asking you.

Speaker 3 (48:19):

And the answers will be hard to come by, especially if you know people through various kinds of smaller universes than the larger universe of people who write about books. That could be you follow someone on Twitter. It could be for example that you're both knitters or amateur rocket hobbyists. It could be that you're both, I'm going to use a native example, Martian Americans, immutable characteristics such as having four ears or being Martian American. I'm obviously using characteristics. No one, in fact has pose particular problems of ethics for assigning editors. I'm getting this because we need to bring it up and then we'll get back to your, but I think this is on point. If you have a book by a Martian American, you can assign it to someone else who's part of the Martian community or you can try and get outside that community. And the smaller the community of Martian Americans and literature is the more likely that you're going to run into all sorts of conflicts. And I would say that you as a writer and your editors should err on the side of saying, no, let's have someone from within the community write about this, even if they tend to have lunch together and let's get that perspective. And then maybe next time they'll make a different choice. But err on the side of permissiveness of inclusiveness, of saying, yeah, you might know the person, but you also know the thing the book is about.

Speaker 4 (49:41):

Just quickly, I amen to Steve that there aren't rules, but there have to be conversations. And when I assigned books, I sent a contract and an ethics sheet so that everybody knew my mortal sins and to start the conversation. And if your editor hasn't asked you, you ask the editor, where are your boundaries? What are you looking for? Tell me a horror story, whatever you do, but start that conversation so you're not there alone.

Speaker 2 (50:09):

Yeah, I would really concur with that. And I'm shocked by how many reviewers for us say that they don't have this conversation with other editors. And I think I've started to tell them what I'm going to say now is challenge them to have it. I think if you're going to be a venue that publishes work, you need to take responsibility for these things.

Speaker 6 (50:30):

Can I add to really quickly, so at this conference, I met someone who I know only through Facebook, we've communicated a little bit and I realized as we were talking that he really thinks that we're friends. And I didn't think the same thing. I just thought, oh, here's someone I talked to on Facebook occasionally. It's just, it's what it is. And that's the thing I think that's so trickle about online communities is there's sometimes relationships that aren't reciprocal or aren't fully reciprocal. And so I feel like I'd be very comfortable reviewing his work. I don't think he should be comfortable reviewing mine because he's already decided we're friends. Even if that's largely illusory,

Speaker 2 (51:08):

You can tell Brian writes speculative fiction. Yes,

Speaker 9 (51:14):

I really appreciate this recent conversation about guidelines because I remember years ago,

Speaker 2 (51:21):

So the question is, couldn't there be an attempt for a more universal code of ethics? I'd echo what Steve said earlier and that I think a universal code is not impossible, but I think local codes should be developed and encouraged and transparent and put in public so that ours are posted on our website. And the more people are transparent about what they do locally, I think the ecosystem gets clearer and where different places might fall becomes clearer, but I'm not sure it would, again, this is a great diagram because it shows how large this universe is. It just feels like it might be too unwieldy. We also haven't talked about the question of audience, and they're really another factor in this. I mean, we create rain taxi for, we have an audience in mind. It's you and we acknowledge that the New York Times has a different audience in mind, and so we are going to write differently. It's great when different places review the same book because ideally they're going to do it differently. And audience is one of the factors. And maybe their local codes of understanding or of how they draw the relationship, where they draw the line, if it's, do you know your dog or are you friends on Facebook? Those become more interesting actually when they differ. Yeah. Yes, please.

Speaker 2 (52:58):

The question was, when you work for a publishing house reviewing books by essentially similar publishing houses, would that be seen

Speaker 5 (53:06):

As conflict? No, actually we consider that community because in a sense we're, it's very much our intention to support the good work of other members of our community. But if I, for example, review a fence book, I love Fences of publication. There's no or money exchange between us. I love that. I can't remember whether it was Carolyn or Steven said it was blood, sex and money. I think were the three.

Speaker 2 (53:36):

Marriage, yeah,

Speaker 5 (53:37):

Marriage. But marriage doesn't count as sex. Thank you. Oh, darn.

Speaker 2 (53:44):

I think it's more like your sister-in-law,

Speaker 5 (53:46):

Sister-in-laws connected you by marriage, but one Got it, got it. Thank you. That

Speaker 2 (