Georgia Hilmer

Dayna Tortorici

October 28, 2021

I can remember exactly where I was the first time I read Dayna Tortorici’s essay “In the Maze,” a chronicle of the surreal indignities of modern womanhood in the era of Me Too. I viscerally recall my face getting closer and closer to my laptop screen as I scrolled. I can conjure the twitchy itch of wanting to share it with one, two, no, six friends before I was even halfway finished. “In the Maze” arrived, to my mind, like an instant classic, capturing the urgency and immediacy of the moment while situating it in the broader historical context from which it metastasized. Again and again I find Dayna’s writing to be a site of both recognition and revelation. Like so many people, I read her work and feel seen. At the same time, I read Dayna to feel destabilized — I know an essay by Dayna will draw into sharp focus ideas I have failed to make the connection between before. 

Dayna began her literary career at n+1 magazine as an intern in college and has been a co-editor there, where “In the Maze” was published, since 2014. What is it like to spend one’s whole working life at a single publication. How has she shaped and been shaped by the magazine? In a relationship with an institution that starts so early and is so intellectually formative, does the distance between the person you are and the place you work collapse? Questions like these, about labor and identity and passion, live in so much of the work Dayna touches, animating both her own writing and the pieces she edits, like “Cash/Consent” by Lorelei Lee and “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener. I return to those essays again and again; rereading them regularly only yields more insight. It was such a pleasure to interview Dayna for this project and learn about how writing that means so much to me came to be.

This interview took place in January 2021. It has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: When you were in college you applied to be an intern at n+1. What were you reading and thinking about that propelled you towards the magazine world? What was your intellectual life like at that moment?

Dayna Tortorici: I was an English major. I wrote a nonfiction thesis, but my “concentration” within the major was literary theory. I was always interested in philosophy and theory, but I was intimidated and sort of turned off by the analytic bent of the department. In high school I’d been really into David Foster Wallace's essays, the virtuosic, indulgent stuff in Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, but that made me more interested in essayistic magazine writing than straight journalism or reporting. And I loved Joan Didion. But, you know, as a student I didn't have much time or willpower to read periodicals. I didn't come from a periodical-reading home. It was the people who worked with me on the weekly paper who put n+1 on my radar. I’d read some nonfiction from n+1 at the time, but to be honest I didn't know that much about it. I was kind of just thinking, “What job or internship can I get that will justify my decision to not go back to school next semester?”

How did you think about the difference between editing and writing at that point? When you were working on your school's paper were you there in a writing or editing capacity?

Mostly editing, but I did write. Writing terrified me, I can't even begin to explain. I had applied to be an illustrations editor on the paper but they needed section editors, so I was hired to be an Arts editor. I was a sophomore, which was young for an editor then, and I was constantly trying to keep up with the pace of production and my own expectations for myself. I was always more panicked than other people thought was necessary, but I’m bad at being a novice, I like to know what I’m doing. By that point I'd done a lot of tutoring, so I had some training and experience giving other students feedback on their writing. It turned out that editing was not that different from being a writing tutor: you're just helping somebody get their paper done and teaching them better habits and strategies along the way. 

When I started on the paper I was constantly cajoling people, begging them to write something for Arts so that I could fill my quota. Chasing people down like, “That's so interesting, you have to write about that.” Now it’s second nature. When someone starts talking about something interesting, something that clearly animates or excites them, the gears start turning, I can’t help it. I have to stop myself from saying, ”You should write about that.” Sometimes I would have to write to fill my section and that always was very, very scary. It felt so high stakes. Writing was something other people had to compel me to do, I would not volunteer to do it on my own. It started that way for me too at n+1 — I would only pitch or write something to fill a hole, which gave me the justification or courage to push through. That’s how I started writing and eventually got more comfortable writing.

Just on a gut level for me, I can put myself in your position as a college student and think, “What do I have to say? What am I going to mean for the rest of eternity that I would like to have in print for everyone to read for as long as I live?” Those are the hang-ups I would have about that. What were yours?

I mean, definitely those. I have no problem technically writing sentences — I have always enjoyed that — but publishing can feel vain or pointless when you don't have anything new to contribute. Reasonably, I was like, “I'm 19 years old, what do I know about anything? Nothing. Even the way that I write about my own experience is going to be hamstrung by my lack of insight about myself or about the world that I grew up in, yada yada yada.” So it was often about a lack of content and a lack of confidence in what I had to offer. It was easier for me to write things that were scholarly or critical, because I knew I was a decent researcher and a good reader. I knew I could put in a certain amount of effort. I could think about it like: “I read all these things so that you don't have to, and here's what they say.” I could be confident about the level of authority I had with something like that. 

I think that part of your strength as a writer comes from that kernel of doubt you write with. It's what appeals to me about someone like Zadie Smith, who allows a sort of wobbliness to live in a piece. You don’t write with a blinding confidence, you interrogate and investigate your own ideas. Do you think that your editing experience has shaped your writing in a meaningful way? Can you be a coach or an encouraging therapist to yourself when you write? Or is an external authority necessary to drive a piece through to coherence or completion?

I do need someone else. I'm not sufficiently internally bifurcated, I can’t switch off one to do the other. I think I tend to turn in cleaner copy on first drafts than some writers, and I do think that comes from being an editor. I hold myself to a high standard when deciding if a draft is worth showing somebody. But that has its downsides. It takes me longer to get something out, and sometimes I have to throw out what feels like a finished piece and start over because the frame or conception is wrong, which could have been avoided if I’d shared my progress sooner. As for authority and certainty, those things can be earned and have their place, but it’s dangerous to write from that place all the time. It shows, counterintuitively, a lack of confidence, or a lack of bravery. 

I often think of the writer-editor relationship as a kind of baton race. The question is how far you can carry the baton before you collapse, panting. Maybe it makes a lot of sense to do a lot of handovers and you only do one lap each. But because editors are so overloaded — and I know how hard it is to be an editor, especially when you're underpaid or under-supported — I try to get the thing as far as I can before I hand it over. I’ll say, “Okay, here's what I was trying to do. Here's where I hit a wall. Here's where I just don't know if this is working at all. What do you think?” When I turn in a draft of something, I tend to frame it with an editorial note the way I would frame an edit with an editorial note. 

I think that something that is unclear to most readers (or at least was to me for a long time) is just how collaborative that writer-editor relationship is. As a high schooler I thought that writers handed in completed works and the editors checked the grammar. Before that college paper job and n+1, did you have a sense of what the nature of that relationship was like?

The first time I heard of an editor figuring very prominently in a writer’s body of work was in a piece in The New Yorker called “Rough Crossings,” about Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver, which described just how much Lish’s line-editing shaped the Carver style. I remember being very struck by that, by how an editor could be responsible for a writer’s style by deletion. That was a revelation. It made a lot of sense, like, “Oh, yeah, of course, there's more than one person who touches this.” But I think it was always clear to me how much cheerleading was involved, and how some writers need more cheerleading than others. It was just something I understood instinctively from … honestly, from sports, playing sports and how much of sports is a mental game. Writing is a mental game too.

Were you a track star? I'm basing that guess on your baton metaphor.

I was actually a soccer player.

What position did you play?

I played left mid and center. 

I played right mid. You have to haul ass, you have to do a lot of cheerleading. I'm sure there's a parallel you can draw there between the two roles: being a midfielder who holds the field together is akin to being an editor who keeps an outfit running.

I really, I really, I really appreciate talking to a fellow midfielder! There isn't as much glory in the position, but I found it so satisfying.

Same. There’s undervalued glory in making an assist.

Actually, you know what, I do think there is a strong correlation between the love of the assist and the love of editing. There’s that satisfaction you get from setting up a beautiful corner kick. You may not have crazy stats, you may not have a beautiful highlight reel of goal-scoring that gets you a full ride to college, but it’s so satisfying. People know when you made the play happen. I love sports.

Another thing that always feels opaque to me is just how long it takes to get a piece from idea to publication. At what level of consciousness is an idea gestating before you write it? Is it deep in the muck? Or something you think about every day?

It's a little bit of both. It's like a sine wave: deep in the muck for a really long time until I'm actively working on it. I think of myself as a slow writer, but I'm actually not a slow writer of sentences. I just have to think and read and metabolize for a long time before I get started. It's very normal for me to read and think about something for two and a half years and then write a piece in three weeks. But I count the whole time as part of the process.

What do you think your effect on n+1 has been cumulatively over the years? 

I think it's been on two parallel tracks. One has been the push to grow and formalize certain aspects of the organization, to stabilize them and create continuity, because it's difficult to work someplace where the terrain is constantly shifting under you. I certainly did not do that alone, but I have been at n+1 for so many years, I've been a part of every change: expanding the full-time staff from one to six people, providing decent benefits, formalizing the intern program and paying the interns, formalizing the editorial and production processes for the magazine and for books. So many things. When I showed up there it was a little bit like building the ship while you were sailing it.

Another (obvious-to-me) part of my contribution has been making feminism a central concern of the magazine. That includes feminism as a topic being written about and feminism as a way of working. Sometimes that’s more philosophical, sometimes it’s very practical, like making a point to publish more women and LGBT writers. I feel like that really became possible when a new generation of editors came up in the magazine, but even more so with a new generation of readers, who hadn’t inherited an idea of n+1 as a boys’ club. It was freeing to get out from under that reputation.

I've also worked with a lot of writers on essays that use the first person to navigate pretty difficult material, which is a style of personal-critical writing that has always been a calling card of the magazine but is, in my opinion, only getting stronger. I’m really proud to have brought in writers like Andrea Long Chu, Anna Wiener, Lorelei Lee, Dawn Lundy Martin, Alex Kleeman, Ari Brostoff, Jordan Kisner, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Sarah Resnick, among so many others. 

n+1 has an unconventional editorial structure for a magazine. Can you describe it?

The magazine was started in 2004 by six people who more or less made editorial decisions by committee. I think it very quickly became evident that — this is my understanding — this was a very painful and time-consuming way to make a magazine, especially for unpaid editors. Which is why we don't do it anymore. We still have a volunteer editorial board that commissions pieces from writers, and we meet three times a year to discuss the pieces and give feedback. Based on that conversation, the editors-in-chief, currently Mark Krotov and I, decide what to run in the upcoming issue and what changes we want to see to the pieces. 

I do think you need to have a hierarchy to run an organization with any kind of longevity. Otherwise you get a little bit of that tyranny of structurelessness that can really ruin collaborative projects, where the principles of equality and horizontality don't actually produce the best outcomes, they just create a power vacuum. And then relationships and interpersonal dynamics supplant more formalized hierarchies, so you end up getting hierarchies, but they are disavowed. Under structures like that people get paranoid or alienated and burned out. So I am very pro-structure, and I think the system we've hit upon is good for having a little bit of both models: you get the collaborative origin point and open-endedness of a big group, with the focused direction of a small decision-making body.

Mark and I don't sit down and say, “We want to have a magazine where we address this, this, and this, now go out and find the person to execute our vision.” It's very much like: “You’re an editor, you're a smart person, you have good taste, things that are interesting to you are probably interesting to all of us, what can you find?” It's very driven by the personalities behind it. So of course people come and go, and as people's interests change, so does the magazine. n+1 ends up being a more interesting and eclectic publication that way. The current editorial board consists of people who love the work but have other things going on: they're in graduate school, or they’re teaching, or they're writing a book, or they have another job at another publication. They're doing whatever they're doing, but they still want to participate in this project in the ways they can, with whatever time commitment they can, because for one reason or another they love it. And there are people who have been involved for a long time. 

The labor of love idea, obviously, is one I have interrogated a lot for both personal and political reasons. I think there's always gonna be an element of it at n+1, it’s just sort of endemic to non-profit culture and independent publishing. There's a lot of people who just start stuff because they love it. But sometimes as you get older, as a place gets more professionalized, you can't really justify people doing administrative labor for free. It's hard to do middle management work as a labor of love. It doesn't quite make sense. But some of the more grunt-work stuff can have a labor-of-love aspect — like picking up a bunch of boxes of the new issue with your colleagues and moving them somewhere because they need to be moved somewhere. There's a kind of community to that — when we're all packing up a party or setting up a table or whatever. But it's real work. It's hard. It's a complicated thing, equitable pay in the passion industry.

“Equitable pay in the passion industry” is a great collection of words, I’ll file that phrase away for some future use.

It's so tough. There's so much arts-adjacent or literary-adjacent work that people pass off as something you should do for free because you can think of it as apprenticeship or access or networking, and that’s just bullshit. It's a job. But at the same time, it's also true that there are elements of grunt work you do at a small publication that you're not going to get overtime pay for, because when you look at the profits and losses, at the Form 990, you see the money is just not there. It's weird. You have some of the mentality of being a small business owner without owning anything. Talk about false consciousness. It's complicated. Right now I'm just glad to have a job.

I'm interested in where your interest in the labor movement comes from and how your engagement with the subject relates to and affects your own working life.

I think my interest in labor came out of my interest in the labor question within feminism. I don't come from a political family, there was always a kind of peacekeeping spirit to not talking about politics. Feminism spoke to me directly and spoke to conflicts and experiences in my own life, in my own identity, and in my understanding of self. It was just really immediate, really relatable. Feminism was and is the anchor point of my politics. But through reading more about feminism I became interested in the body of work around domestic labor, invisible labor, emotional labor, affective labor, feminized labor, whether that was in the official workforce or not — stuff I related to but that also took me beyond myself and my first conception of feminism. It was a short step from thinking about unpaid domestic labor to paid domestic labor, and the way those struggles are enormously different and yet fundamentally related. So a feeling as simple as, “I'm so fucking sick of doing the dishes,” led me to political questions that were less about me personally.

In a piece like “Lean Out,” about feminism and labor, you examine an issue by using contemporary texts (so many texts!) as the basis for really rigorous intellectual analysis. Then there are your more personal pieces, like “My Instagram” and “In the Maze,” that I'm so impressed and moved by on a visceral, emotional level. Is it terrifying putting yourself out there in the vulnerable way of the latter essays? You don’t totally pour your guts out in them, but you do make your perspective central. How do you approach writing like that?

It's a great question. They were both subjects that I lived with for years and my subjectivity was always intertwined with them. I felt that the more reported or argumentative versions of those pieces — on Me Too or Instagram — had either been done more successfully by others or were somehow incomplete, declining to comment on what it was like to actually just be a person living inconclusively inside these forces. Especially with “In the Maze,” the personal, thinking-on-the-page approach felt like the true only way in.

“In the Maze” was about something that I had observed in my personal and professional life, which was the creeping resentment of and resistance to feminism in my immediate world. The fall-out around Harvey Weinstein was so exhausting and so tense, and also represented one of those moments of collective emotional release. I and a number of women editors in my industry had pushed so hard for years to change things where we worked. We were finally able to publicly say, “Okay, when we’ve been talking about these problems internally, this is what we've been talking about.”

I didn't really want to write anything; I felt like there had been so many think pieces already. My husband Stephen was like, “I hate to say it this way, but your people are going to want to hear from you on this subject.” And we needed an Intellectual Situation for the newest issue of the magazine. It would have felt like a missed opportunity to not talk about it, because being emotionally exhausted was the story, in a way, and I could write about it from inside that feeling.

The only way I could approach it was through my personal experiences, because all the examples were really personal. When I'm driving to work and I'm hearing on the radio about this guy with his Supreme Court case talking about how he wants to cut up his wife into little pieces on Facebook and defending himself on free speech grounds … and then I am getting an email from a writer who's feeling aggrieved because I don't want his piece about his divorce and Jordan Peterson, as if this editorial “no” is a free-speech issue … and then somebody I know is on the Shitty Men in Media List for choking somebody and not in a fun, consensual way … at a certain point you feel like a chump if you refuse to acknowledge that all these things are happening at the same time. How could I act like nothing was wrong? I didn't know how to talk about that very specific feeling without being myself. It felt like there was no other way to write that piece. 

And then with “My Instagram,” there have been so many smart pieces about the influencer economy and Instagram and I didn’t have anything to add on that score. But I hadn’t read anything yet about what it’s like to live alongside this platform over a period of time, which is how the vast majority of people experience it. I'm just a regular rando on Instagram. I would get high and look at it for too long and have all these thoughts about what I was looking at and take notes. Mark Krotov was really my cheerleader on that piece. He was like, “You have to do it, you have to do it, you have to do it.” And then of course because of the algorithm my view of Instagram is very personalized, so it would be absurd not to acknowledge that.

I think that what really succeeds in that piece for me is how specific your perspective is. A lot of pieces about Instagram rely on abstractions or generalizations or big tech scare words. Your piece is full of descriptions of what you're actually looking at, what's actually appearing to you, the insane juxtapositions that arise. It feels like you're kind of on Instagram as you're reading it. I think a lot of people writing about Instagram avoid actually writing about what it feels like to be on Instagram.

One thing that had occurred to me was, because of the way apps and operating systems work, things are seamlessly, continuously upgrading. People might freak out when an app logo or feed style changes, but then the change is metabolized and people move on. It’s so fast that a few years pass and you'll be like, “Wait, you did what with your pictures? You put a vignette filter on it?? That was psycho.” Realizing how much this visual paradigm was changing, it felt important to catalog what it looked like in that moment. The aesthetic is so specific and yet it shifts. I wanted to pin it down before it turned into something else. 

When I read “In the Maze,” I immediately thought, “I'm going to send this to twelve of my girlfriends.” I wanted to say, “This is what I mean, this is how I feel, but here is Dayna saying it like I never could.” That line by your friend Elizabeth Gumport where she says, “It’s not that you can’t speak. It’s that other people can hear you. And they’re telling you what you’re saying is crazy,” that really hit home for me. When someone can deliver you the extremely concise articulation of the feeling that you haven’t been able to name it's like, “Oh, thank God, there are people out here who are doing the work of perfectly describing this moment.” Did your anticipation of how the piece might be received shape how you wrote? Were you able to push past fear to go farther than was comfortable?

It's hard to remember. I think that if memory serves, it was such a frantic period, and exhausting, just exhausting. I think every industry and field and discipline and department had its own moment where Me Too, or the “reckoning,” whatever it was, was happening inside the building. The fall-out in the media and the literary world was really fast. People had been stewing about it for a long time. We were dealing with personal crises with writers and contributors and friends, having to figure out what happened with so-and-so, do we need to retract this, do we need to call this person? There was a lot of putting out fires all the time and figuring out who's safe, who's not safe, what needs to be done. Writing the essay felt really calm compared to what the day-to-day emails and communications were like that fall. I remember feeling still when I was writing it.

I had a lot to say. It was the inverse of the old problem, “Okay, but what do I say?” I felt like I could get it out pretty quickly because at that point I felt like I was an expert in sexism. What I had to do was think through: How does race fit into this? How does the class fit into this? Where does the anti-semitic opportunistic element fit into this? I had just been thinking about it for years and years. I felt relieved. I didn't really think about people reading it. It was a really shitty time. It's so delicate, and it's so personal. Some people might read it and think, “This is bloviating and grandiose,” and somebody else might think “Finally, thanks for saying the thing I'm thinking.” It doesn't have to be universally loved, but I appreciated that there were people who saw value in it. I was really touched by the number of people who reached out to me afterward, mostly women, who sent very short emails that said, “Thank you.” I had never experienced anything like that before, people didn't really read my stuff like that. The truth is that it didn't feel that vulnerable to me because there was so much more that I did not put in that essay.

I was specific about who I shared it with because what I was saying by sharing it was, “This is how I feel. This is where I'm coming from when I talk about x or y.” There were people I didn't send it to because the piece was so precise and accurate in its articulation of my feelings that if those people didn’t get it we might have reached a point of no return, emotionally.

Can I ask about the book you’re writing? 

It's a novel. It’s so hard. I'm sure it would have been very challenging to be writing a book or doing any kind of book-length project after writing mostly 4,000 to 20,000 word pieces. But writing fiction is a different animal. In general the process is just so much more wasteful than I thought or expected. I say “expected” but I didn't go in with rosy expectations. I knew it would be a nightmare and I did it anyway. It's a personal growth thing. Novels are my first love — not writing them, reading them. The same way I felt petrified writing anything at all at the beginning of my — should I say career or writing journey? both are horrible — now I'm feeling like: it would be sacrilege to write a bad book. But also it would be so sad if I died and never tried it.

That's good, put it in those terms. Make sure those are the stakes so you can’t reasonably not do it.

You know, the thing that's so fun about editing is that it's a really efficient process. You can read something and put in like, three or twelve hours, and it'll get 60% better. You can send it back to someone and maybe they're mad at you at first, or maybe they're immediately grateful. They might say, “Wow, how did you do that?” And you're like, “Well, actually, all the stuff was already there. I just moved it around a little bit.” It's so fun. It's so satisfying, the dopamine is constantly hitting. But with writing a novel, you know, I've written so much stuff that’s just in the garbage. Maybe it's another story, maybe it's another book or maybe it's just trash, I don't know, but it's not in my novel now. Like all things it's gonna take me a while, but it's fun. It's fun when it's not horrible. It's a whole different toolbox. When you’ve got to make all the stuff up it's different.

Do you have a timeline you’re working on?

Yes. I'm not gonna tell you because I'm about to blow it. 

Perfect. 

No, it's okay. My editor knows that I am behind and also … COVID was not exactly the most conducive to productive novel writing, unless you’re Jonathan Franzen. I'm facing down some of the familiar writing demons, like, “This is bad. No one should ever see this. There's nothing good in here. I should not publish anything unless it's awesome.” And it is just simply true that you have to write a bad book before you write a good book, which is painful. I realized I had this deep but unstated fantasy that I could write it through one time and it would be pretty good. It's like, “OK, that literally has never happened to anyone, so I don't know why you thought this would happen to you.” 

I think that humankind's persistence as a species, though, depends on that spark of semi-delusional hope.

It has forced me to engage with the world of creative self-help and “craft” in a way that I hadn't before. And it's very easy to roll your eyes at craft talk, like in a Paris Review interview when they ask, “How do you arrange your desk?” But when you are facing down this impossible task every day? I'm like, “No, but literally, how do you arrange it? I really need to know.”