Barbara Berson ‘79
Eva Glassman: What drew you to Red Weather? How did you get involved in the literary community at Kirkland?
Barbara Berson: I entered Kirkland as a theater major, but then I started taking creative writing courses, and that was what had drawn me to Kirkland. The arts focus, and the creative writing and the theater was very immersive. So I was doing theater workshops and I was studying. I think it was with Michael. Michael Burkard was there at the time, and Tess Gallagher, Bill Rosenfeld—it was like a real creative writing department, anyone who was interested in writing. There weren't tons of us at a small school. So I began with writing, and I guess it would be inevitable that I would be involved with the magazine just because it's a way to show your work and have it read, and I actually enjoyed the process of working on the magazine, which, at that time—I'm sure now it's different--but at that time, it was literally a cut and paste kind of thing. I think there's an old picture from the yearbook of Peter Cameron and I standing over a drafting table with an exacto knife and cutting things out. It was old school, but it was a pleasure. It probably speaks to the strength of the writing workshops, that there's the writing side and there's a rewriting side, and so that part of me was very engaged. In some ways, editing the magazine was kind of interesting to me just in terms of reading and assessing and putting the whole thing together—not alone, with other people, So I just enjoyed it. It was just sort of an extension of the process, the writing process.
EG: Did you join the magazine originally as an eboard member, or did you join right away as an editor?
BB: Jo [Pitkin] would probably remember this. I just remember we were a pretty tight group. The magazine was called something else, and I can't remember what it had been called. In some ways, my involvement was part of a cultural community shift. There seemed to be, in changing the name and in changing the way it was identified and how it related to the campus and writing community, I just remember, there was just discussion about what the magazine was and what it could be. I think I just became editor after Jo, is what I'm thinking. Maybe I assisted her. I might have done a year of being just part of it. I just remember being editor and I can't remember if I was editor for one year or two. I don't have a strong memory of how long that went on for, but I really loved it. I can't quite remember whether I was a pair of hands initially or a reader of submissions. I do remember discussing how we would read submissions, how we would do the process, so I must have participated under Jo's direction initially is what I'm guessing. And then I became editor after that, I guess. [taking out an old RW issue] Let me look and see what year this was. This is Fall ‘78, so it says I was editor then. I guess Vicki Kohn was after me and I don't know if that was in ‘79? Maybe. ‘79-’80, maybe I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if that's helpful. It's all a bit blurry.
EG: That’s okay. When you took over as editor, what was your vision for the magazine? Where did you want it to go? How did you want the submissions to look? Did you want them to encapsulate a certain theme?
BB: We wanted to change the look, and I can't remember what the look had been. I'm looking at it now, and it probably could have been a little more interesting, but we wanted it to look elegant, I think, and serious. But I also liked the idea of putting more visuals in. At one point we even did an issue with—I think it may have been Vicki Kohn—these photos of mannequins, these black-and-white, well, everything was black and white, but these sort of shadowy, you know, mannequin-y, weird-looking things. We tried to integrate those in and look at the work in terms of, I don't know if it was partly theme or partly mood, but it was really dependent on what we had going on. I like the idea of working visually as well as with text. I think it was just like the work people were doing. I think it was really about that and we had a committee of people reading stuff. The people who were in here were the people who were, for the most part, doing the creative writing coursework. These were people who just took a course and their writing was good. It was just about quality. At that time, it was a good period for the writing program because it was pretty new, and there was a lot when I was there in the first couple of years, because there were few creative writing undergrad programs, and because Michael [Burkard] and Tess [Gallagher] were so connected, they brought so many great writers up to campus, so it was a very exciting and inspiring time for us as students, because all these great writers like Thomas Lux and John Ashbury, [Robert] Creeley, they just came, and they had this poet poetry festival thing one weekend where they just got all these great writers to come up. It was a very flourishing time, so I think with the magazine, it wasn't so much about trying to create themes as much as just share what everybody was doing. We didn't want it to be all one thing. Do you do somatic issues, or do you commission things?
EG: We kind of take a similar approach. We don’t really set a certain theme. We just take submissions of whatever people have been working on, and then from that we look and see how there might be relationships between a few different pieces of work, and that depends on the order that we put them in the magazine.
BB: I remember that, too, yeah. Not necessarily telling a story but having a kind of flow or something like that.
EG: I always find that interesting to see how it plays out because you don't expect to find these relationships between all these random works of art, and then you feel like an accidental genius when you lay everything out and you're like, “Of course this works this way. It has to work that way.”
BB: [laughing] That's right. It was meant to be like this, right?
EG: Yeah, it's fun. How many people were working on Red Weather at the time? Because our board now has thirty people on it, and we have different editorial boards for prose, poetry, and art.
BB: I feel like we had a smallish board. Maybe it was like eight people looking at stuff, maybe ten. I feel like it wasn't a lot. And then we had six production people. This was a small issue. I know we had bigger ones, so it may have grown. How big are your issues now?
EG: It really depends on the amount of submissions we get and the quality of submissions. We don't have a quota that we want to fill, because then we might lower our typical standard of what gets published. I know that the spring semester issue, like from last year, was significantly smaller than the fall semester issue from last year. So it just depends on the quality of submissions we get. What would you say is your favorite memory of working on Red Weather?
BB: I just loved working on it. I just loved being in the studio and laying it out with people and staying up all night, it was just a real labor of love. And we all just enjoyed it and laughed a lot. I felt like I was in my element and. Also, the 1st issue was just really thrilling, because the name and the look of it had changed, and that was exciting, but I think it was just the process of putting it together that I enjoyed, especially doing the manual labor of it. It just felt good.
EG: There's something very appealing about physically laying it out. I feel like it would almost just be easier to lay it out physically and just put things where you wanted them with your hands.
BB: It's an eye-strain and it's a little hard on the neck and shoulders, but there's a lot to be said for knowing how to do all those things. Now you'll never have to know how to do that. In a way, it's fine, but yes, that speaks more to the whole tactile nature of written material, holding it in your hands, using a level to make sure that everything is straight and that you haven't messed it up when you're pasting in a correction. That's not so great, but it was a very collegial experience, so that's something, too, you couldn't do that alone, unlike now. These are things you can do that were mechanical but are now technical.
EG: How has Red Weather influenced your life path?
BB: The thing about working on the magazine was, in some way, it was formative for me. I ended up going on to become an editor, and I always think of this experience of working on the magazine as planting the seeds for that. It's a related experience, but it's different. I understood the writing process and I understood the editing process from the writer's point of view, which has always served me really well, but that relationship to writing really began with Red Weather. It sort of set me on a certain path, which I discovered over time. It was very fruitful in that way. I continued writing beyond college as an editor. I still write on and off. I can't say I'm a writer anymore, but it was definitely important to me. When I finished school, I did get a job in publishing and eventually became an assistant editor, and then an editor, and then an acquiring editor, so all those things built on that experience. It was seminal, for sure.
EG: Where were you an editor?
BB: My first job was at Simon & Schuster, and then I was at Weidenfeld and Nicolson, which is now Grove Atlantic. Then I moved to Toronto and I worked for Harper Collins and then a Canadian publisher here and then I was at Penguin Canada for ten years. I was doing acquisitions and editing of a range of things, because when I started in publishing, editors did all kinds of books. It’s more defined now, you're expected to sort of specialize more, so I was doing kids books and literary fiction and memoir. My last in-house job was at Penguin, so I was doing the kids publishing and adult literary fiction, and then I went freelance. I'm still doing freelance editing, but I also started doing some agenting, which is an interesting, related skill set, but a little bit different. I still do freelance editing because it's just very natural, like second nature for me to do it.
EG: Here's a fun one: What were your favorite authors/novels/artists in college and what are your current favorites?
BB: Back in college, I was reading a lot of poetry, so at that time Louise Glück was huge for me. And I love Jane Anne Phillips, who was just starting. She had these prose poems that I really loved. I really got excited about Frank O'Hara at the time, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams—all those guys, I just really love them. And Racki, obviously. I still read some poetry. Not a lot. Up here, we have this thing called the Griffin Prize, which is a national and an international prize that's given out every year and, so I always go to that and I always read the poets who are on the shortlist. Fiction-wise, I have to say, I've been reading more nonfiction. Lately I’m reading Helen Mcdonald's H is for Hawk, which I had not read when it came out, and I started reading her essays from the second book, and I think she's just an unbelievable writer. I always loved Jonathan Franzen, but I haven't loved as much of his work in the last number of years. I recently read Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe. It's about the troubles, the Irish Troubles, but through this incredible narrative lens. It's again nonfiction, but I thought it was phenomenal. Sigrid Nunez, The Friend. I read it twice. I thought it was incredible. When we are done, I'm going to remember some book that really changed me in the last number of years, but I can't think of it right now. I discovered Abraham Sutzkever, who is a Polish poet and just amazing. I can't remember when he died, but his poetry is really beautiful. Often, I get the New Yorker and I'll just read the poems, but I don't follow poetry as closely as I did, and fiction wise, I'm sort of all over the map. I've always had pretty broad taste, which also was helpful in being an editor, because it suits that in a way, to have a wide range of interest. Are you reading something now?
EG: I think my favorite author at the moment is Sally Rooney. I really enjoyed her novels. I recently read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. She's very interesting as well.
BB: I just picked up one of her [Death In Her Hands by Moshfegh] books, actually. When I read Normal People, I quite loved it. In a weird way, it reminded me of Jane Austen in terms of her concerns about class and the sort of things that divide us. And then I read Conversations with Friends, and then I kind of felt like, “Eh.” It probably has to do with me being older. Have you read her new book?
EG: I have read her new book.
BB: There was like a big article [by Stephen Marsh] about it that made the rounds. It took issue with a lot of things, but also had a lot of sympathy for it. It was good. He [Marsh] had a lot of strong feelings about it, but it was really interesting. It was very thought provoking, and how he read it, you might find it interesting or infuriating.There's so much out there now, I find there's just too many books out there. Not enough great ones. I'll probably read the new Sally Rooney at some point. I read Conversations with Friends relatively recently and, I don’t know, there was something about it. I think it is somewhat generational. She's doing something really different and weirdly compelling for how paired down and flat it is in ways. It's kind of unputdownable. I also read Chen Chen. He's based in Rochester. I went to this writer's festival in Rochester a few years ago and somebody mentioned his book and I started reading it and I loved it. He's a poet. He did a collection called “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.” But the weird thing was like I'm reading, and he dedicates a poem to Michael Burkard, because I think Michael teaches in Syracuse. He just knew him. I was so touched that in a way, that I would like to find this poet at the time. I'd never heard of him and I was like, “Who is this guy?” He's obviously come to people's attention because that book was from 2017, but he’s just a wonderful writer.
EG: Those were all my questions, so unless you have anything else to say about Red Weather or writing in general, I have no other questions.
BB: I feel indebted to that experience [of being a part of Red Weather] for helping chart a course for me. Whether somebody goes on to continue writing or to become an editor, they are both part of the creative process. I think discovering that, the creativity in that, and the creative engagement and editing—to make something to put something together like that, to make a book out of it was very gratifying for me, and I hope it is for you.