Richard Ford on the Folly of Removing Teresa Weaver

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections matter.

Q: You signed the recent petition to protect Atlanta's book review. Do you have any thoughts on this trend of newspapers cutting back their book sections?

A: I think that rapacity and the urge to silence the national discourse about American culture has been dear to the heart of the Hearsts and the McCormicks. So that it should bubble up again in the heart of the nouveau riche people who run the Atlanta Journal Constitution should not surprise us. But I mean it's erosive of our ability to both know our culture and to appreciate it and to criticize it, and that's exactly what those Republicans don't want us to be doing. I'm glad the petition is going somewhere.

Q: Yeah, it's getting close to 4,000 signatures -- in addition to you there's Reynolds Price, and Bobbie Ann Mason, Chris Offutt,

A: So people down there, that's great. I don't know anything about the closing down of Teresa's job that anybody else wouldn't know, but it's a small skirmish in a war we've been losing for a long time. Teresa is particularly -- to lose her -- to lose that page she designed, in that particular sphere of influence down there, to lose her is just particularly galling. And so absolutely unnecessary, completely unnecessary. Those people are making [adjectival] of money. What they're going to do eventually is put the whole thing online and there won't be anymore morning editions of that paper. But you're not going to find somebody like Teresa Weaver anywhere else who has been as loyal she has been, and made such a difference in the culture of a place which could very easily be a wasteland.

Q: When you first started publishing, were there any reviews which were encouraging?

A: There was one in the National Review. It was a nice piece that put me into a sort of frame that included agrarian writing. I didn't want to be in it -- I didn't want to be in the agrarian writing tradition. But I thought that the guy who wrote it - it was a guy named Gold.

Q: Herbert Gold?

A: No, wasn't Herb. It was somebody else. But he liked my book, and I don't think he liked it because he could force it into a bracket it that it didn't fit in, but it was a good review. I found it encouraging, and I clutched it to my bosom because Larry McMurtry tore me a new [adjectival] in the New York Times, that really rocked my boat.

**