The Whitney Review Captures The Zeitgeist

I read a really brilliant conversation between you and Lynne Tillman for Interview Magazine, in which you discuss the current landscape for reviewing. I’d be interested to start there, as that landscape felt like it was the motivation for starting the Whitney Review.  

The Whitney Review definitely came from a feeling that there were a lack of places for criticism. In some older models, like the alt-weekly or a daily newspaper’s arts and culture section, these kinds of magazines that we are seeing less of now, they would have a short review as a format. Now we see more artsy lifestyle magazines with personality-driven coverage. There are more profiles and interviews and less criticism and reviews. The magazines or journals that do still run book reviews tend to run more longform pieces.  

Places like The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, or Bookforum are excellent, but they cover maybe six to 10 books an issue. There are a lot of books that don’t get covered in the current ecosystem, and it felt that there was space for something which had an accessibility, a voice that was less formal, and an interest in reviewing a broader spectrum of books. There are a lot of books out there which are deserving of discourse.

Each issue you have over 50 shortform reviews, right? Did you choose shorter form reviews so that you could accommodate a lot of coverage?

Exactly, and also, short pieces are a lot more accessible for people to write. I was thinking from the perspective of a writer – the amount of time it takes to write a review that’s 200 words, versus 2000 words, is very different. So part of the aim of the magazine was to let people have this forum to share thoughts about the stuff they were going to read anyways, and they would maybe text a friend, or post about. It’s a space, or forum, to record that casual discourse that smart people invested in certain spheres of interest are going to have.

Twitter used to be a place where this kind of discourse would happen, but it doesn’t really exist in the way that it did. This feels like a format that could replicate that space, in a way.

I was inspired by Twitter to some degree. People, in that very short character limit, often had very sharp, insightful perspectives. Sometimes someone could say something in two sentences that was more of a revelation than a 3000 word essay. So I was interested in that format, and in recording it for posterity too. 

A print magazine is going to circulate in a different way than social media, and I think there’s value in recording these opinions and circulating them in another way. I do think putting this stuff in print is really cool, it’s important to archive how people are, and to record snark or certain more voicey reactions that are not in a formal register. I studied a lot of 18th-century literature in college, including the explosion of pamphlets, which you could compare to blogs. Pamphlets were cheap and quick to publish and they basically circulated hot takes. To see these raw, urgent, opinionated texts that responded to their moment preserved and studied hundreds of years later had an impact on me. It might not have been conscious, but I think that did inform the magazine. I am really interested, in different ways, in the feedback loop between print and digital.

You don’t digitise any of the issues, right? Is that an active choice, or is it more to do with the labour of running a site?

There are a few things. One is, when you have the website, it’s hard to say no when people say, “Can I publish this interview?” It’s already so much work to make a magazine that it’s nice to have clear boundaries like, “This issue is closed.” 

It’s also about value. It’s hard to make people pay for things when they are free online. Another thing is that people have pretty thin skin these days. Naomi Kanakia, who runs the Substack Woman of Letters wrote about The Whitney Review saying it was, “Free of screenshot-ready dunks.” I think that is a very concise way of saying something that I was thinking about, which is that print gives people a moment to digest something negative or critical, which means it circulates in a different way than if it was online.

I feel like the literary space is interesting at the minute. There’s quite a punkish energy, with physical readings and newer publications emerging, but then at the same time there’s a hyper-professional MFA culture, in which many people have spent a lot of money to produce a novel in a very specific environment. I’m interested in what you think in terms of these two sensibilities converging?

I definitely think that the zine, in the past year and a half, has been really co-opted by marketing. Obviously everything gets co-opted, but in this recent indie mag print renaissance, corporate strategist types have really hopped on the bandwagon. 

I have also seen the framing of people’s self-publishing, which is often quite ambitious and professional, as ‘punk’, and I’m not sure it is… There’s a lot of ambition right now. I mean, everyone has, I feel, a boot on their neck just to try to pay their rent these days, so it’s not that I subscribe to any purity about this stuff. But I just see a lot of the current “zines” and “self-publishing” as just as professionalized as an MFA.

In the new issue we have an interview with a 1990s zine queen Lisa Carver. She exemplifies the relationship between zine publishing and alternative music. For her zine Rollerderby, she interviewed a lot of figures from grunge, post-punk, noise, and industrial music. And she fronted a band herself. Her rawness and independence is just another level, and that sensibility is there whether she’s self-publishing or publishing somewhere like Soft Skull. We also did an interview for a past issue with Ishmael Houston-Jones. He’s mostly known as a dancer and choreographer, and in the 1980s he was bringing something like a punk sensibility to those worlds, with his approaches to contact improv for example. He also has a less-known writing practice. He has only one self-published book, and it’s so good. So I guess I’m agnostic in terms of how work gets produced, whether there’s institutional or commercial backing or not, however it happens, I just care that it’s good. But I am interested in building lineage with figures who work against the grain or outside of dominant structure across different eras or fields.

How has the magazine evolved since its inception?

I am still very invested in the editorial parts, but more and more I feel that I have to think about strategy for survival as a publication. I didn’t really foresee how much I was becoming an entrepreneur, basically. I’m just back from this independent magazine conference, so these conversations are top of mind. Over and over people there were saying, “Editorial is the easy part. Figuring out how to make a sustainable business is more challenging.”

Where does your funding come from, is it advertising? 

Yes, print advertising and magazine sales. I feel grateful for finding an audience and these partners, but it’s still scrappy. I still work other jobs outside the magazine. We’re still growing and figuring out how to translate the buzz and momentum into something sustainable. I think that every issue gets better. I’m always excited about what’s next. There’s something about the magic of the spirit of the zeitgeist which is so exciting to me.

I wanted to ask about the themes. 

I don’t give top down themes for each issue but rather they emerge naturally while I’m editing the different texts. It’s so exciting how it happens, how two people in separate essays or interviews will speak to the same themes. Two different reviews will circle around the same ideas. This most recent issue there was a lot I discovered about freedom. There’s also a thread of magic or spirituality, whether in the context of occult societies, body modification, or puppetry. I’m articulating these themes as a framing device which then amplifies or underlines these connections for the reader. I feel like this process is always evolving, and part of the evolution is that with each issue we’re getting better and better at channeling that zeitgeist. Part of it is listening to your instincts, and hearing the noise of things happening in synchronicity.