from today's New York Times: Click here for the whole story.
<<<
A Suicide Leaves a Literary Journal and Its Editor in Limbo
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: September 10, 2010
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Ted Genoways was just 31 when he took
over as editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review in 2003, determined to propel
the storied but old-fashioned literary magazine at the University of Virginia
into the 21st century. Three years later he made good on his promise. The tiny
journal won two National Magazine Awards and six nominations — up against
perennial glamour titles like The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and Vanity Fair
— and Mr. Genoways was hailed in national literary circles for his spunk and
vision.
But by this summer, things had gone dangerously south. Mr.
Genoways had become alienated from his small staff, some of whose members
repeatedly complained to the university president’s office about his absences
and his attitude. His initially warm relationship with the university’s English
department — whose renowned creative writing division includes novelists and
poets like Ann Beattie, John Casey, Rita Dove and Deborah Eisenberg — had
cooled after he sought a position there and was summarily rejected.
Then on July 30, the review’s managing editor, Kevin
Morrissey, took a gun to a coal tower on the outskirts of town and killed
himself, an act that some of Mr. Morrissey’s friends and family attributed
partly to stress in the workplace — even going so far as to lay that stress
publicly at Mr. Genoways’s door.
Now the 85-year-old review is in limbo. University officials
have canceled the winter issue and closed the offices until an investigation
into the staff’s complaints is complete. Mr. Genoways is fighting for his job,
his reputation, his $134,000-a-year salary and his legacy as the editor who
helped put the review on the literary map far beyond the “academical village”
founded by Thomas Jefferson, where William Faulkner, a pipe between his teeth
and a Tyrolean hat on his head, once strolled as writer-in-residence. >>>