Pub Talk with Catriona Menzies-Pike

Pub Talk is an interview series where we chat to some of Australia’s most experienced and influential people in publishing and the arts.

You’ve been editor at Sydney Review of Books since 2015. Can you give me a bit of an overview of your journey in writing and publishing so far?

Prior to starting the role at the SRB, I toggled between working in universities and working in digital media. I’ve got a PhD in English and did lots of teaching and was on the adjunct treadmill that’s familiar to many people working in the cultural sector.

I was also managing editor at the really pioneering website New Matilda from 2008 to 2012, and that was in a very different digital media environment. That was before the Guardian was publishing in Australia, before there was a lot of opinion and hybridised opinion reportage online. So it was a great time to be working with writers and publishing in a daily and a weekly environment, which is such a different way of connecting with readers than the geological academic time frames. From there, I went to The Conversation as arts editor and applied that experience working in digital media to working with academics, to try and find ways to speak to general audiences about specialised research topics.

And so to a large degree, the work at the SRB brought together these two different threads of my working life—the research background, the teaching work, the working really closely with students, the breadth of material that you need to be across as an adjunct teacher were all really useful for stepping into an editorial role that requires lots and lots of reading and a breadth and a depth of knowledge about literary history, especially Australian literary history, and an interest in close reading and a sense of how mentoring relationships might work. And that was coupled with this long term engagement with digital media, with making websites and conversations about innovation and tech that I’ve been a part of since the late 90s.

What does the typical editorial process at Sydney Review of Books look like?

I really like, especially for reviews, to talk to people about where they might take an essay and have an opportunity to weigh in on that process early on. We discourage people from sending in unsolicited full pieces—firstly because it creates a huge reading load for us, and it’s really impractical to get through. I also have concerns about on-spec submissions and the way they shift responsibility for labour onto writers, and it means that people wind up doing a tonne of unpaid work, essentially. I don’t want people to waste their time. And as an editor, I want to be able to hear about a proposal in its early stages so that I can really support a writer in the later stages. So we work on a pitch basis for our reviews, which form about 70 per cent of our program. And I also commission work, and I do so guided by books that I’d like to see reviewed, but also by writers that I’d like to work with. And to me, the relationship between the writer and the book under review is very important. It’s not the case that ‘I must have a review of this book, it doesn’t matter who writes it’. People typically only write for us once a year, if that, so I really want to be certain that there’s a reason for our audience to read a given writer on a given book. That’s not to say there’s a preconception about how they’re going to evaluate a book—just that that relationship is important. And often when I’m starting a conversation with a critic, I’ll talk to them about books that are most interesting or engaging to them, as a way of finding the right book to place with them.

‘To me, the relationship between the writer and the book under review is very important…I’m interested in the presence of the critic as an entity, a persona guiding a reader.’

I’m always really grateful when people are willing to trust me to read their work in progress, the work that they would never, ever want to have see the light of day. It’s a matter of trust between the critic and the editor. So there’s not a consistent process—it depends on what a writer wants. Often I will bring in other readers, whether from our small editorial team or from my colleagues at the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney. That’s where I feel like my knowledge hits its limits. Or if there’s a particularly knotty set of questions, or someone’s making a really big claim, I bring other people in who do have the disciplinary knowledge to check out those claims.

It’s interesting what you say about the trust element of it—that’s something I often think about when I’m editing, especially when it comes to reviews of any kind—a lot of the time I won’t have read the book in question, nor will a good many readers of the review. So it’s a matter of trusting that the reviewer is reading something in good faith, reviewing what is on the page rather than speculating or projecting.

Yeah, I share those reservations, and I’m always trying to encourage a good faith approach to reviewing. I always try and encourage critics writing for the SRB to do more close reading, which I think is a great test of a critic. It’s something that is really illuminating for readers. I think responsible practices of quotation go a long way to helping that process along in really requiring a critic to show you how they come to their conclusions. I try and spend as much time as I can with the books under review as well—and if I’m finding an essay difficult or its claims implausible I’ll go to the book itself to try and understand how it is that the critic formed their ideas. I do a lot of asking questions in the margins of the essays that we publish and try and put myself in the position of the general reader saying, like, what do you mean by this? How do you get here when you say their language is like this? Can you provide quotations that show me at least, as the editor, that you’re on firm ground here?

What things do you look for when you get a pitch, or when you start a conversation—what is it that makes you sit up and go, ‘this is good, this is interesting, this is worth pursuing’?

I really like to be able to hear the voice of the critic, and that usually comes through in a pitch and hopefully carries through the writing process. So I’m interested in the presence of the critic as an entity, a persona guiding a reader through a reading. I welcome original readings and readings that are informed by all kinds of knowledge, whether institutionally credentialled, experiential, or other forms of knowledge. I think often terms like ‘critical energy’ or ‘criticality’ are taken as synonyms for negative evaluation. But for me, an essay that animates the process of reading, that narrates the process of reading and the cognitive drama of sitting with a text and thinking about it, is always exciting and always appealing. I do think of the critical essay as a distinct literary genre—so I am interested in style, I’m interested in voice and tone. But a critical essay is also a contribution to a discourse about Australian literature that is conducted in public spaces, in universities, in all of these other environments that constitute the literary field, and so needs to be able to draw on the knowledge of that field and to be acting in good faith. None of this is to preclude writing bad reviews, anything like that, but the review is quite an interesting form in the way it circulates in a number of different environments.

‘For me, an essay that animates the process of reading, that narrates the cognitive drama of sitting with a text and thinking about it, is always exciting.’

As well as editing, you’ve been on the other side of the process as an author—your memoir The Long Run was reviewed and praised around the world when it was published back in 2016. Did that experience of writing and publishing change the way you edit, or your attitude to literary criticism?

I think if you’re a critic or if you’re editing critics and you can’t think of writers as actual humans, you need to do some careful thinking. That’s not to say never write negative evaluations, but I think there are lots and lots of humans in the supply chain of writing books and writing criticism, and these are fundamentally human transactions. Being reviewed, for most authors, is a really uncomfortable experience. Whether those reviews are positive or negative, they rarely ever meet the fantasy of what it is to find a perfect reader. So I think a lot about what a ethical reviewing practice is, what the human obligation of the critic to an author is, as well as this more abstract relationship between critic and text. This is not to say you can’t be mean, but if you are undertaking a seriously negative evaluation of a work, for example, to think about the ethical dimensions of that as well. And in Australian literature, you need to think about that in terms of the extremely small pond in which we all swim.

I think it was Parul Sehgal who said something along the lines of, ‘I don’t go to book launches, I’m not friends with authors, I stay away from the scene’. But I don’t think you can do that quite so easily in Australia.

I’ve really tried to foster independent practice among the writers who write for the SRB. There’s times when people have negatively reviewed books by people that I know—there are negatively reviewed books by SRB contributors, or people that I think of as friends on a human level—that’s deeply uncomfortable for me, and I have to think always about how to manage that. But I think the responsibility of the critic is always going to be firstly to the reader, and it’s just that there is another human in the room.

It seems like we’re in a constant state of discourse about the state of criticism and the state of critical culture and whether reviewers go too easy on authors, or conversely whether they are too abrasive for the sake of clicks—and the question of whether people actually read criticism the way they say they want to. What’s your read on the state of cultural criticism in Australia, and do you think it’s changed at all in the years you’ve been at SRB?

Well, I would say that decline narratives about criticism have been a constant of my time at the SRB, and they’ve been going on in a pretty consistent way for all of the 20th century and certainly beyond. So is this to say that anxieties about decline and relevance are core to critical culture? I’m not sure. I would say some of the emphasis in these decline narratives have shifted, or need to be tied to historical contingencies around media conversions. But I’ve really tried to take a longer view about criticism and the criticism that we publish at the SRB, and not catastrophise about what cycles of virality might tell us about critical culture and its audiences. It’s certainly the case that negative reviews or really provocative or topical or revealing reviews, highly confessional reviews built around personal essays do get that sugar hit of virality, and sometimes really substantial ambivalent critical readings don’t attain that visible circulation. And yet, looked at over the longer view in terms of the impact of what we publish, there are other ways for critical culture to register. It’s just that virality is so noisy that it’s really hard to go like, ‘oh, hang on—this essay has been cited a bunch of times, this essay is set on curriculum for study in half the universities in Australia, this essay is finding its way into the established body of knowledge about Australian literature.’ I think it’s easy to measure impact on the hits, but there’s other things that we need to think of, like the influence on Australian writers, on other writers. That’s something that there’s not necessarily a relationship between virality and the essays that really shape the way people think about Australian literature and that have a real impact on the practise of other writers.

There’s also often a connection made between criticism and sales of a book—that if a book is reviewed positively it will sell well, and vice versa, which can lead to a kind of boosterism in the name of ‘supporting the publishing industry’. How do you approach that line of argument?

Criticism that’s worth the name should not be an extension of the book promotion apparatus for publishing. So publishers have publicity and marketing people who are extremely diligent, work very hard at promoting the book and selling the book is their job. Now, it may be that in a media environment of 20 or 30 years ago, where a really large proportion of the book buying population read the reviews in the weekend newspapers—perhaps then you could make a plausible case that good or bad reviews could sink a book. Certainly I have seen no empirical data to that effect. It’s one of those many pieces of folk wisdom about the book industry that people don’t seem to question today. I find it hard to imagine that in Australia a bad review would sink a book’s chances. I’m certain that there are some anecdotal examples of books that have been brought into circulation or brought into prominence by virtue of a couple of reviews that identified that remarkableness—maybe Michael Winkler’s Grimmish is one, but I think that is probably more of an exception.

‘This absurd idea that there can only be one view on a book, or if a book’s won a prize then anybody who reviewed it negatively was incorrect, is so fatuous and time wasting.’

I think building a critical culture should be about building conversations about books and it should have space for a number of opposing views about books. This absurd idea that there can only be one view on a book, or if a book’s won a prize then anybody who reviewed it negatively was incorrect, is so fatuous and time wasting—we should be expanding our sense of what is possible in our literary culture. And I think more criticism, more diverse criticism and no particular requirement for critical consensus is where we should be going. And that’s why I’m very excited to see that there are many, many platforms for critical practise emerging in Australia that are finding ways to expand in conversation and to suggest a range of approaches and a range of ways of thinking about literary culture.

One of the SRB projects I really loved over the last few years was The Circular, an email newsletter highlighting the work of other magazines, either from their archives or places that are less broadly known. You wrote a few years back that ‘a healthy literary ecology is built on interdependencies’—how important do you feel it is to foster this sense of a creative community, over the what is perhaps a more competitive model of trade publishing?

I was very lucky to come of age at a time when there was lots of DIY culture around Sydney and in activist and creative scenes. And that ethos of collaboration and grassroots collaboration is one that I’ve really tried to stay close to as I’ve moved on in my career. We work in a cultural sector that often looks pretty shiny, in a way that makes you think if we don’t have a budget for a huge reception in a foyer with, like, ten staff and a whole lot of booze, like, we’re not doing anything. All of us working in small arts organisations have some really significant points of connection—literary organisations are generally really small, really low budget and really used to doing things on a shoestring. But I think because of the scarcity, it has been really hard to find ways to connect across the sector and to collaborate and not to feel like competitors. This is part of the brutal logic of neoliberalism, obviously, which promotes this last-man-standing ethos, whereas to me it seems like we’re all swimming in the same sea. Which is not to dismiss the real differences and the deep political and aesthetic conflicts that can and should exist in such a community—but I always think there’s more to be gained in trying to find points of connection and collaboration instead of being at odds with each other.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the scarcity of the past few years, because it does feel like there’s a bit of optimism in the air in terms of the new National Cultural Policy that makes a point of prioritising literature and writers. At the same time, the experience of the past few years of arts funding makes it hard not to be sceptical of any kind of announcement. As your time at SRB comes to a close, what’s your outlook on where the sector is headed? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

I think there’s a lot of ground to make up in federal arts policy and federal arts funding and it’s really reassuring to see the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Arts obviously trying to take some steps to restore confidence in the sector and to restore funding in real terms. Funding hasn’t increased since those big Brandis cuts of 2016, so I think there’s a long way to go and I think it says something about how exhausted the sector is that people cheer merely when the Arts Minister turns up and says, ‘yeah, you guys actually have real jobs’. I’m most pleased to see that literature has been designated funding in this cultural policy and really excited to see how that fleshes out. I, like everybody else, want to see money go to writers, but I also really would love to see the small literary organisations that are the R & D department of our sector adequately funded, both in terms of the way they fund writers and the people who work for them. I think there’s huge knowledge in these organisations, but they’re really run in an exploitative manner in terms of labour, and it’s going to take a major shift to turn that around.

‘I always advise people to write about a text that they have an affinity with, rather than just imagining what I might want to read. The best essays are those that are driven by some form of connection with the text.’

What would be your advice to emerging literary critics or someone wanting to improve their practise as an essayist or a literary critic or a mixture of the two?

To read really widely and to read with historical depth, I think, to foster a close reading practice. It’s definitely a drum that I will keep on beating. I think to be a close reader who is open to the possibilities that any given text presents to them. I always advise people to write about a text that they have an affinity with, that they want to write about, to make a case to me about why they should be the person to write about the text, rather than just imagining what it is that I or any other editor might want to read. The best essays are those that are driven by some form of connection with the text. I mean, unless you’re a Parul Sehgal and you are writing a review every week, you should really try and pitch books that you feel an urgent motivation to write about, rather than, say, a high profile book that you think somebody must want you to write about.

You can always pick up when someone’s heart’s not in it.

Yeah. I think if people are trying to second guess the books that you want to review, that’s no good for them either. It’s not that much fun to do a book that you’re actually not very interested in. Shorter reviews, that’s fine—I think it’s a good discipline to be able to pick up a book and present a reading and an evaluation of it. But if you’re going to spend 3,000–5,000 words thinking about this book and writing about it, there needs to be something there.

What are you most proud of in your time at the SRB?

Look, I’m pleased with the consistency of our program, especially over the last couple of years as our program has expanded quite a lot. Certainly I’ve had the good fortune to work with more writers from diverse backgrounds than were on our program when we started—more writers from diverse backgrounds, more emerging writers and more critics who hadn’t been writing in public spaces. I’m really pleased to have supported those writers to publication. I’m also proud of having prodded a bunch of poets and novelists into writing essays, sometimes against their wills, and having seen the results. I really cherish the relationships that I’ve built with a really huge cohort of writers—that’s a cliche, but no less true for being so.

This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.