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.
Read full interview here.