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Temporary Conclusions: Dana Goodyear on Blogging

Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: Dana Goodyear, newyorker.com, podcasts

On newyorker.com and on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast, there’s an audio interview with Dana Goodyear about her piece in the Style Issue on Kim Hastreiter, Paper, and the L.A. downtown art scene (not online). The interview, with web editor Blake Eskin, wraps up with this interesting tidbit about a magazine writer’s experience with blogging; it certainly rings true for me. When getting things right for publication is a struggle between joy and fear (shout-out to my patient editors), getting things published right away can be a fearsome joy.

Blake Eskin: You were reporting on Kim Hastreiter as you launched your blog on newyorker.com. Tell us about your blog, and tell us how it’s different than writing a long article for the magazine.

Dana Goodyear: The blog is called “Postcard From Los Angeles,” a title that I like because it has a New Yorker-ish quality, and sometimes Talk stories from L.A. have that rubric, but also because it has the word “post” in it, so it feels—it’s internet-appropriate.

And they are posts, and what I am loving about writing the blog is that that’s a form that’s very responsive to the immediate, and I think that there are probably some dangers in that, but there’s a lot of freedom in that too. Because the city is still very new to me—I’ve been here two and a half years, but it’s a vast place—and it feels great to have a way of responding to it and a way of trying to process it that is part of my daily life. It’s not just that everything is fodder now, which is a bit terrifying as a way of approaching your life, but suddenly the thoughts that attach to what is going on around me—I am forced to, if I want to, come to a conclusion. Even if it’s a temporary conclusion.

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Who she?

I'm Emily Gordon, reachable at emily@emdashes.com.

I'm an editor at PRINT magazine in New York City. I've worked at The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, and Legal Affairs. I've written for the NY Times Book Review, Salon, The Washington Post, The Village Voice... continued

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A few clips

Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)

More clips.

Tell me more

They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

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Written and edited by Emily Gordon (plus various guest contributors), designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

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