The WCR Interview #3 — Deborah Treisman — January 2016

Deborah Treisman: I started my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen, thinking that I would stay for a year and then apply to Oxford, where I’d spent my early childhood and where my father was still a professor, but I liked Berkeley so much that I didn’t want to leave. Because I wasn’t planning to stay, I spent my first year there taking whatever classes interested me, including a senior seminar in the Comparative Literature department—with a reading list that ranged from The Princesse de Clèves to Effi Briest to Confessions of Felix Krull to Lolita—that was just thrilling to me. The fact that I remember the reading list almost thirty years later is a testament to that. Thank you, Eric Downing, who taught the class and pretty much introduced me to literary critical thinking. Another instructor who was formative for me—Peter Canning—had me reading Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Nietzsche, and Chomsky, and challenged the way I thought about language. Taking a poetry writing class with Ishmael Reed, literature classes taught by Frederick Crews, Stephen Greenblatt, and Thom Gunn, and writing an honors thesis under the direction of Michael André Bernstein: all horizon-expanding, broader and more idiosyncratic than the education I would have had if I’d studied English only at Oxford. So I’m sure it opened me up to a wider range of voices and literary approaches.

WCR: What years did you study at Berkeley? And what about your experiences of Berkeley outside the classroom, did they make an impression on you as well? Telegraph Avenue, Sproul Plaza, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement, ongoing discussion of the fate of People’s Park, Hate Man (a former New York Times reporter who wore a dress), Stoney Burke?

Treisman: I was at Berkeley from 1986 to 1991, but spent 1989-90 living in Paris and studying at the Centre d’Etudes Critiques and the Sorbonne. I definitely took more classes in the Comp Lit Department than in the English Department. Yes, Berkeley the town and its characters (don’t forgot Rick Starr in your list!) made an impression—how could they not? They were ever-present, a constant reminder of recent history, but there was more burnout and craziness than serious political activism. Berkeley in the ‘80s wasn’t Berkeley in the ‘60s or ‘70s; there was political color, but it wasn’t a driving force in my time there. I did all the things you’d expect a young literary person to do—hung out at Caffe Med, went to poetry readings at Cody’s and, in San Francisco, at Café Babar, etc. Made great friendships that I still treasure today.

WCR: Related question, having been born in England and studying on the West Coast, did you develop a certain amount of an outsider mentality? If so, does this come in handy as a reader—and editor—of fiction?

Treisman: You mean, did I feel like an outsider because I wasn’t American? I’d grown up in England and then in Vancouver, Canada, so I was already something of a West Coaster. Having lived in three different countries by the time I was sixteen, I suppose I had some sense of what it felt like to be transplanted and to adjust to cultural variation. But, other than a few not so happy elementary-school years, I don’t think I ever felt locked out of anything. On the other hand, my fluency in British, Canadian and American English idioms has been a boon.

WCR: Tell us what it was like working with Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review. How did you land that job, and can you share some glimpses of Wendy, a unique figure in American letters? What were some practical lessons you learned from her about the art of editing, what to do, what not to do, how always to be getting better at what you do?

Treisman: Wendy was a great role model—someone who had sensed a void in literary publishing and worked single-handedly, with inimitable drive and stamina, to fill it. I was her first assistant, and I was part-time, working out of what had once been her apartment in North Berkeley, so it was still very much a one-woman show. My duties were mostly administrative—she taught me how to seal ten envelopes at once, when sending out direct-mail campaigns!—but I did also read manuscript submissions and talk to her about editing and book-reviewing. It was an inspiring introduction to the world of literary publishing.

WCR: Your parents were subscribers to the New Yorker and you would occasionally take a look. Did you enjoy the cartoons? Did you do much reading of the magazine at an early age?

Treisman: I wish I could remember in more detail. I was obviously aware of the magazine, and of the fact that it published poetry and fiction, both of which I would sometimes read, but I don’t remember any specific pieces I saw back then.

WCR: Do you still have the rejection letter you received when you submitted to the magazine at an early age? What can you tell us about the story you submitted? Have you read it again any year recently?

Treisman: I submitted a story when I was eleven or twelve. Because I’d skipped grades, I was in eighth grade at the time, so it may have been a little less precocious than it sounds. In any case, I quite deservedly got a form rejection slip back. I don’t have that or the story because my mother and stepfather’s house in Berkeley, where I lived for my first three years at Cal, burned down in the Berkeley-Oakland fire in 1991. I have no paper trail from my life pre-1991, so I can’t really assess the degree of pretentiousness in that pre-teen story submission, but I assume it was high! Later, in my last year of college, I think, I did submit some poems and got a more personal, hand-written response from the poetry assistant at that time, which I found very gratifying—and which has stayed with me as a reminder and a reassurance that writers submitting their work aren’t always devastated by rejection, so long as it’s thoughtfully handled.

WCR: When you started working at the New Yorker, you were aware of the magazine’s august history, of course; had you read many books about New Yorker figures or otherwise studied earlier generations of New Yorker editors?

Treisman: I hadn’t. I came to the magazine blissfully ignorant of most of its internal history. I started here about nine months before Tina Brown left, at a time when there had been a fair amount of staff turnover and turmoil. The fiction department had undergone an upheaval when Tina hired Bill Buford, from Granta, to be the fiction editor, and some long-term editors had left or changed departments. Bill, of course, hired me, so it was a change I benefited from.

WCR: What was it like meeting Roger Angell, a longtime fiction editor at the magazine, who worked for years with Updike and Nabokov, for example?

Treisman: Working with Roger—who is still here several days a week, at age 95—has been an inspiration. It was intimidating at first, because Roger’s opinions tended to be strong and they tended to be negative; I sometimes felt that if we ran only the stories he really liked we’d be running four or five a year, instead of fifty. But when he did really like something, it was amazing to hear what he had to say about it. When he didn’t like something, he disliked it in detail, and that was often productive, too. To work in the fiction department alongside the son of the magazine’s first fiction editor, Katharine White, to have that kind of institutional history, that enormous pile-up of knowledge and experience, so close to hand, was quite something—as was watching Roger shepherd into the magazine the work of Updike and William Trevor and others.

WCR: Garrison Keillor told the Atlantic in 1997 that Angell was an “old-fashioned seigneur of an editor,” the type “who was terribly generous with his praise and apologetic for his criticism and who, if a month passed without submissions from me, would write the most wonderful encouraging letters.” That was a different era. Is there any of the “old-fashioned seigneur of an editor” to your approach?

Treisman: Well, I hope there is, of course. Now that we’re putting out a magazine, and a website, and a digital edition, and various podcasts and radio shows and other multimedia material, there are fewer minutes in the day for graciousness, let alone for encouraging letters. But I do what I can. You might be better off asking the writers I work with that question.

WCR: What was it like working with David Foster Wallace, and how do you see his legacy?

Treisman: I miss working with him. Although he wasn’t always reachable—and a lot of our communication happened through voicemail messages and letters—there was always a sense that he took whatever suggestions I offered very seriously, whether or not he accepted them in the end. Each small tweak in the text was something to think about and debate from absolutely every angle. (I included some quotations from his letters on the subject in this short piece that ran in the magazine when he died.) And although he had a great sense of conviction about what he was doing, he also had an unusual humility and vulnerability. As for his legacy, I worry a little about his effect on the many younger writers who try to work in a similar vein; he’s inimitable. But he left his writing, which is legacy enough.

WCR: What practical suggestions would you make to writers who aspire to be published in the New Yorker?

Treisman: Write well! Worry about the work, not about getting it published. Don’t become obsessed with conspiracy theories about connections and agents and back doors to success. I do feel that the best writing rises to the top, no matter where or how it enters the stack.

WCR: How many pieces of over-the-transom fiction are you reading a month these days; out of those how many might be published in a given month; and are there certain obvious ways that it registers with you that a story is falling short? Are there patterns you can point to?

Treisman: We get somewhere north of two thousand submissions a month, and publish four. I think that what we look for are not the ways in which a story can fall short, but the ways in which it can succeed—originality of voice, humor, style, plot. There are many, many ways to write a good story, and we try to represent the spectrum.

WCR: We hear much talk about the death of books and the death of the short story, and yet there is a lot to be excited about when looking at the place of reading in our national life today. What are the things that you are excited about? What writers or trends in writing do you like to celebrate? What has surprised you?

Treisman: I suppose I think that the things to be excited about don’t change: you get excited about writing that moves or challenges or disturbs or entertains you, or does some combination of those things, whether it was written this year or two hundred years ago. There’s always a core group of writers I’m excited to hear from—new and established, young, middle-aged, and old. It’s a particular thrill to read an amazing story by a writer I’ve never heard of or who’s never been published, but it’s also exciting to find myself in the literary hands of a real master. I don’t have a particular allegiance to any trend—and I’m afraid I’m distrustful of the idea that there are real trends in literature that extend beyond what seem to me incidental formal or stylistic tics. One of the pleasures of editing fiction at the New Yorker is that we’re not restricted to any specific school of fiction-writing. The mandate is to cover the spectrum and publish the best work of each kind.

WCR: You launched the online-only New Yorker Novella series in November with Callan Wink’s novella “In Hindsight.” Can you tell us anything about how many readers “In Hindsight” reached via the website? Tell us again about the decision to publish some fiction online, please. Might this eventually lead to publishing short fiction online only as well in some cases? And can you tell us anything about upcoming novellas?

Treisman: I wish I could push a button and get up-to-date statistics, but whatever number I give you today will be incorrect by the time anyone reads this. I do know that “In Hindsight” got almost twice the median number of hits for a fiction piece on newyorker.com in its first week. We were very happy with that performance, and hope it’ll hold true for future online novellas. We don’t have plans to publish any shorter fiction online only. It’s important to me not to set up a tiered system—not to have to go to a writer and say, Well, your story wasn’t strong enough for the magazine, but it’s good enough to go online. Really, I think any piece of fiction we take on should rise above the bar and be strong enough for us to think it deserves that weekly spot in print. The problem with novellas is that we simply don’t have enough page space for them in the print magazine, and the site affords us a way of taking on work we feel strongly about and would otherwise have to pass on.

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