This week, we hear from Maggie Doherty, a critic and teacher at Harvard University. Maggie writes often for publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and N Plus One; her criticism often focuses on writers and feminists around the middle of the 20th century—familiar names are Mary McCarthy and Kate Millet. Maggie’s literary criticism blends questions of politics into her writing; she manages to marry the literary and the political in her writing in a careful and very helpful way.

In our conversation, I ask Maggie about her recent articles on Mary McCArthy and Kate Millet, as well as a book she’s working on. The book is titled The Equivalents, and it’s about a group of five women writers and artists who met at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. We talk particularly about one such Radcliffe writer, Tillie Olsen, and the insights she advanced into the ways writing is really work: that is, is labor. We talk about writing as work, and the economic situation—that’s to say economic contingency and precariousness—that writers and academics face today.