In defense of Ted Genoways

Tom Bissell, a longtime Virginia Quarterly Review contributor, has written a defense of embattled VQR editor Ted Genoways for the New York Observer. Genoways has come under fire for workplace bullying since the suicide of managing editor Kevin Morrissey.

Read more on that story here.

Bissell's piece, titled "From Tragedy to Trend Story," questions the manner in which the story has so far been reported, specifically in its treatment of the embattled editor.

From the Observer:

I would like to believe that I know enough about human nature to be able to sense within someone to whom I am close a monstrousness capable of tormenting a colleague into the dark embrace of suicide. What I do sense in the VQR tragedy, unmistakably so, is a far more complicated story about people who grew to despise one another, worked terribly together and had access to too much money and not enough support systems, whether personal or official. But "workplace bullying," like the "ground zero mosque," is a narrative so easy and pleasing it practically fits you for your toga. (Mr. Genoways has, he recently told me, begun getting death threats.)

It is probably not possible to run a magazine if the editor in charge of the magazine is structurally unable to fire those beneath him. But the cartoon villain described by anonymous VQR staffers in the stories that have been published about this tragedy simply do not jibe with the experience any of Mr. Genoways' friends or writers have ever had with him . . .