More thoughts on VQR

Writer Steve Almond weighs in on the Virginia Quarterly Review tragedy in a thoughtful essay titled Let Us Now Raze Famous Men: A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts). Though Almond shares his thoughts on managing editor Kevin Morrissey’s suicide and the bullying allegations put forth against editor Ted Genoways, the essay is really about writers, editors, the dynamic between them, and the importance of words on a page:

31. Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity . . .