When you produce academic work, you must give but also take reviews. I’ve written before about how I write reviews. Equally important is how to receive them.

Every review is a gift. The time and energy reviewers spend on your work, they will never get back. A review with emotion—any emotion—is the greatest gift of all. If you made a reviewer feel, you struck a well, an artery. Its force may propel you back at first, but that propulsion reveals: there is a depth and power here. If only you can tame it! So do not “address reviewer concerns,” harness them. Where you find strong feelings, there is water. Strong feelings are your dowsing rod. You are an excavator. Divine the source, the vein of something precious in the common dirt. Bring it up and polish it.

Thanks to Sarah Barrington, whose advising prompted these thoughts.