Welcome to Office Hours, a series brought to you by the Features section! In these articles, Argus writers speak to faculty, staff, and members of the administration about their interests, classes, and lives on and off campus.

Andrew Leland is the 2024–25 Koeppel Fellow in Journalism, jointly housed within the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism and the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times magazine, New York magazine, Art in America, Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, The New Yorker Radio Hour, and elsewhere. In 2023, Leland also published “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight” (Penguin Press), which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. He is a contributing editor of The Believer magazine, and he hosted and produced The Organist, an arts and culture podcast from KCRW and The Believer.

At Wesleyan, Leland currently teaches two classes,“Reporting for Narrative” (WRCT217) and“Accessible Writing: Disability, Language, and Media” (WRCT218). Last semester, he also taught “Introduction to Journalism: Constructing the News” (WRCT288).

This week, The Argus sat down to speak with Leland about his time as an editor and audio producer, the process of writing and editing, and the importance of journalism in a continually changing media landscape.

The Argus: Let’s begin with your path towards journalism. Can you tell us about your college experience and what led you towards a career in publishing, editing, and writing?

Andrew Leland: I’ve always been interested in writing, and before I even had a word for editing or publishing, I was interested in making books or zines. In college, an upperclassman handed me this online humor magazine and was basically like, “You’re the editor.” Around that time, I was obsessed with McSweeney’s, which still is a daily humor website, but also was, back then, just a couple of issues into its quarterly magazine. It would publish fiction, but also really interesting nonfiction essays and journalism—it was similar to magazines I’d read, like The New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker, but also nothing like them in a way that I found really exciting. So I did an internship [there]. I was going to Oberlin College, and we got the month of January off to do a project called Winter Term—I returned [to McSweeney’s], and at that time, they were starting The Believer magazine behind the scenes. And, long story short, I came back to college and almost immediately got a call. They said, “Our original managing editor had to leave, so we’re sort of in this sudden lurch where we need somebody to step in and be managing editor.” I was like, well, this is the job I went to college to get, so I dropped out with about two years left and moved to San Francisco.

A: What was that experience like?

AL: It was just a really incredible and difficult but exhilarating education in everything, you know, in production, in design, in editorial writing, and working with writers and editors who I admired and had sort of geeked out on so much as a reader. Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida were the three main editors of the magazine, and I learned so much working with them. The rest of my [education] experience was the eight years I spent as managing editor. That naturally flowed into starting this podcast called The Organist with KCRW, a Southern California public radio station, where I really tried to apply what I had learned at The Believer in terms of making this blend of criticism, creative nonfiction, journalism—anything, everything nonfiction could do and be, but in the audio form.

A: I’m curious as to how you made the shift from The Organist and The Believer, where you’re editing other people’s work, to writing and creating your own, including your memoir.

AL: I always knew that I had this eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and in the last 10 years or so, that slow degeneration of my vision, which has been going on my whole life, hit a new phase and started to interfere with my work in terms of reading visually and navigating and getting around. But it had this funny effect where it actually opened up a lot of possibilities for me as a writer, and that was when I made the transition from really thinking of myself as an editor and producer to being a writer. The more I wrote about my experience of blindness, the bigger of a subject I realized it was, and the more curious I got, the more I wanted to connect my experience in a journalistic way to this bigger world of disability politics and culture and [the] social world. I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine, wrote a reported feature for The New Yorker, and produced pieces for Radio Lab—all of those clips that are in my bio all came out from [this] period. I’ve written about other things than disability, but it’s really become my beat—and then that called me [to my book “The Country of the Blind”].

A: Why Wesleyan?

AL: It took me three years to write [“The Country of the Blind”], and then for basically two years after I wrote it, there was this wave that I surfed for a long time of activity around the book that I think led directly to Wesleyan, where I saw the fellowship advertised. There was a moment of imperative, a moment where I felt like, okay, I have to pitch another book, I have to do something else now to sustain that. When this fellowship came along, it felt like a really exciting opportunity to not immediately dive into a second book project, but, as my friend who also teaches journalism at Brown said, to return to first principles a little bit and to think about: “What is this work? How am I approaching it? How might other people be approaching it?”

A: Inspired by the Shapiro Center’s current speaker series, The Art of Editing, what differences do you notice between your roles as a writer and an editor? How do they intersect for you?

AL: When I reflect on it, my years as an editor did prepare me to be a writer. I think people do a lot of agonizing about how teaching isn’t writing, or editing isn’t writing, and only writing is writing. And I think that’s true—the butt-in-chair philosophy is legit. Unless you’re actually writing, you’re not actually writing, which sounds tautological, but there’s a sort of reality to that. But at the same time, I was so immersed in thinking about how stories are structured. Working as a fact checker or working as a copy editor, even working in production, just thinking about the sort of machinery of what makes a reported essay, was in my bones at that point. So, when I sat down to do it, it was already gestated in a way. And I think, conversely, now that I think of teaching as a lot like being an editor, my experience now as a writer has really sharpened [my editing]. Now I have more insight into what it feels like and even more practical tricks. They’re like two sides of a sharpening stone—writing sharpens editors’ work, and editing sharpens writers’ work within the same person.

A: Absolutely. I think that’s something that a lot of editors at The Argus, including myself, have noticed; where we are when we begin as new writers and who we are as editors now—there’s often a lot of growth, noticeable growth there. I look back at what I wrote as a first-year, and I think I must have been a nightmare to edit. Of course, we all have this experience of looking at where we were, where we are now, and looking at the people, especially new, young, first-year writers, whose work we edit—and there’s so much possibility in the writers they’re going to be in a few years.

AL: Can I respond to that? One thing I’ve noticed among writers who I know, particularly journalists and nonfiction writers, […] gets back to this idea of omnivorousness, but also a generosity of spirit. There’s a stereotype about writers and editors being hypercritical, condescending, intellectual powerhouses. And certainly that’s a deserved reputation. But if you look at people whose job it is to go out into the world and meet people who are involved in far-flung pursuits, you need to have a certain open-mindedness and a kind of…I don’t know if “faith” is the right word, but like a faith in other people, even people who aren’t credentialed. 

There’s a very populist sense [that] the world is interesting and valuable, and I’m curious about it. And I think editors have to have that same quality which the reporter needs in order to walk into a situation and not just think like, oh, all these people aren’t worth my time, and have the patience to sit with potentially boring or annoying or toxic situations until they find what’s valuable there. And I think editors similarly have to really sit with writers who might sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about, or be grandstanding or be confused, and just have faith that there actually are interesting ideas lurking in there and that they can be pulled out. And I think teaching feels that way too, where you have somebody who might show up at the first day of class, and your instinct is, oh, not sure where this is gonna go, but give the person a couple weeks, and they will definitely find their way.

A: Speaking of your teaching, on that side of the fence now, how is the journalism curriculum different from when you were a student? Is there anything you feel like universities should be doing now, as we look towards the next generation of writers and journalists?

AL: I’ve taught journalism at a number of institutions, and journalism in academia has a little bit of a vexed position, because it gets pigeon-holed, I think, into a position of vocational, pre-professional pursuit, which often at a elite liberal arts institution like Wesleyan can be a problem for an administration that is trying to put value on the liberal arts and a critical-thinking education. There’s a lot of different ways you can teach journalism, and it’s possible to teach it in that very cookie cutter way; I recognize that’s not what a school like Wesleyan might want to offer. When I came to this fellowship, they suggested that I teach an intro to journalism class, which is not actually a class I’ve taught before, and I felt a little skeptical of that. But I think particularly in this political moment, in this media moment, there’s a way that journalism, teaching journalism, can also be a form of media studies that is deeply relevant in a liberal arts context. Journalism is so interesting because it really explicitly pulls huge chunks of sociology and English studies, creative writing, history; it’s that omnivorous discipline, again, where you can kind of pull from everywhere. I see that in the classroom too, where, like in my class this semester, I’ve got government majors and anthropologists and Science and Technology Studies [majors]. Everybody is bringing those perspectives to bear. That’s the approach I try to take, where it’s not just, “Here’s how to make a sandwich,” but it’s trying to really make good on its presence in a university like this, and pull from those different disciplines.

A: We look all around the country, and it’s becoming clear that the landscape of journalism is changing. As local news outlets are slowly defunded, and there is an increasing rise in conglomeration of and censorship in major news outlets in what many people are calling the death of the free press, but also new levels of citizen journalism, where do you think student journalism fits into the conversations we are having about news and press today?

AL: I think you only have to look at the student protest movement that came up around the war in Gaza and the way that, across the country, student journalists were breaking that story and that national news media were relying on student journalism to offer a way into the protests that were happening. If you look at the history of American journalism, there is a clear line between student journalism and what ends up being the journalism that’s driving the conversations across politics and culture and media. It’s not just like a walled garden: The things that student journalists are reporting are real, and they have real world effects. And it doesn’t always feel that way if it’s like a conversation with some dorky journalism professor—just kidding—but, you know, but I think you see it in moments like that, when it breaks national news. But it doesn’t need to break into the national news spectrum to have that same kind of impact on actual people’s lives.

A: As journalism develops, there’s this increasing intersection between technology—including that which helps us take greater steps towards accessibility—social media, and public policy. In the context of all of that change, what do you think every journalist needs in this current media landscape?

AL: I think that the way that political polarization has fractured news is so dangerous, and we’ve lost this sense of trust in facts and the authority of a paper. I think it’s good to be skeptical of what you read, but I think it’s clear that that process has gotten out of control in terms of the post-fact era. What I would want every journalist to have in confronting that media landscape that we’re in is a fundamental handle on reporting. Last semester, we talked a lot about the sort of tradition of objectivity and journalism. It seems like the way that people are thinking about journalism now is less about objectivity and more about transparency. As the saying goes, you’ve got to be able to show your receipts. And it sounds trite, but I think that there’s a deep value not just [in] constructing an argument, but in painting a picture of a situation that is deeply reported and verifiable. That is the core activity of journalism, and that’s the core skill that you need.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rose Chen can be reached at rchen@wesleyan.edu.