The Suicide, The Virginia Quarterly Review….and the Media

A highly respected American literary magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, announced Tuesday that it was going on “indefinite hiatus,” pending an internal investigation by the University of Virginia following the suicide of the VQR’s managing editor, a man named Kevin Morrissey.

It seems that the tragedy of Morrisey’s death was followed by allegations of what is being called “workplace bullying” brought against VQR’s editor, Ted Genoways, reports the C-Ville, Charlottesville’s News and Arts Weekly, one of the few publications to provide sober-minded coverage of the painful story that has triggered a minor media frenzy, but little fact checking or accuracy.

My friend, the wonderful author Tom Bissell, is one of those who wrote for the Virginia Quarterly on many occasions and knows the accused editor Ted Genoways quite well.

After listening unhappily to morning show hosts and self-styled “bullying experts” as they speculated mindlessly on the tragedy, Bissell decided to write his own narrative version of the complex human crosscurrents he thinks may have contributed to the death of one bright man and the pillorying of another.

Here is how Tom’s essay begins.

On July 30, Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of America’s most respected and ascendant literary journals, took his own life, apparently unable to abide the pressures of his job. His suicide has since opened a debate on the issue of “workplace bullying” and called into question the integrity and morality of his boss, Ted Genoways, the editor of VQR, whom I have known, and for whom I have written, for the past seven years. This unrelentingly sad story saw only limited coverage at first but has now jumped the regional transom and been featured in many prominent media outlets, including, earlier this week, The Today Show.

It says something about the nature of the story’s initial coverage that while reading it over for the first few days, I felt as though I must not have known Mr. Genoways very well at all. A man I have never witnessed even raise his voice was, suddenly, an office Iago who shouted at his staff, sent traumatizingly cruel emails and singled out Morrissey in particular for what his sister described on The Today Show as “ongoing, daily assaults.” Many of Mr. Genoways’ writers have come to his defense, only to be told that the issue here is not Mr. Genoways’ editorial skills but rather his managerial competence.

Meanwhile, the comments on sites that have run pieces about this tragedy are now reaching into the hundreds, the vast majority of which are purely speculative, written by people uninformed as to the particulars of this situation. The most heartrending comments come from members of Morrissey’s family, from whom he had been estranged for some years, and who understandably want an explanation for how and why this happened. However, a disproportionate number of comments have been provided by workplace-bullying experts, who have a vested interest in stepping to the forefront to display their expertise and thereby control the narrative. Virtually all of these “experts” have concluded that Mr. Genoways is a hideous bully….

Read the rest. The essay is smart and psychologically insightful, as is usual for Bissell’s writing. Even if you know nothing of the Virginia Quarterly Review, I promise you’ll find Tom’s analysis worth your while.

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PS: In this week’s issue of C-Ville, Bissell, along with 29 other Virginia Quarterly authors, signed an open letter citing the “speculative accounts and egregious errors have already found their way into mainstream media outlets” and calling for an impartial investigation into the matter.

Let us hope that the University of Virginia is wise enough to make such an unweighted investigation possible.