Sasha Weiss on Mischief in the Pages
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
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: Sasha Weiss is the first editor I ever worked with on a reported piece, at the time a new type of assignment for me. I was writing about the mysterious Elena Ferrante and I was entirely unsure of what to do, but I soon discovered that I could put my faith in Weiss as part teacher, part therapist. She has a unique way of pushing her writers, forceful yet compassionate. Indeed there are many paradoxes in my working relationship with Weiss, now the culture editor at The New York Times Magazine, who is at once electric with insight and totally calm in demeanor. In an e-mail, Sam Anderson, one of her long-time writers at the Times, employed a memorable metaphor to describe Weiss’s process: “We have a running joke—not really a joke—about how editing me is like potty training.” She was delighted by the analogy.
In our conversation, Weiss and I talked about potty training writers—about patience, perseverance, and a willingness to let people make mistakes when risking something new.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Sasha Weiss is a writer and the deputy culture editor at The New York Times Magazine. Previously she was the literary editor at The New Yorker and an editor at The New York Review of Books.
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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.
