Is it wise for a fiction writer trying to get somewhere to write honest criticism of other writers?

The 2018 Best American Short Stories dropped at midnight. I've been planning for a few months to try my hand at critiquing a good chunk of the stories in it this year. By review, I mean more than cobbling together a few of the phrases you read on book jackets, then passing off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I mean read them seriously, the way they were meant to be read, and offer up the results of thinking about them.

Back when I was new to this blog, another writer suggested I shouldn't spend so much time on a project he viewed as negative. I think he principally meant the negativity of talking about the frustrations of trying to get work published, but he also likely meant writing negative things about others in the writing business.

Judging from nearly every other writer I see, he's right. The business model involves constant positivity. When you talk about other writers, talk only about how excellent their work is. This encourages them to say the same about you. Maybe if you're an established commodity with your own brand, you can afford to attack another writer, because the publicity will be good for business, but otherwise, it's best to just say everything is great.

I don't know whether any writers will ever notice anything I write about them. I get a small but fairly constant stream of traffic to this site. However, some of the most read pieces I've done have been the pseudo-reviews of earlier works from Best American Short Stories I've done. There aren't exactly hundreds of writers out there reviewing, critiquing, or analyzing these stories, so it's possible the writers will see what I write.

That leaves me with this conundrum: am I even capable of honesty, knowing I could be blowing up whatever thin chance I have of connecting with someone who could help me break through by saying something negative?

I'm not really looking to "review." The point isn't to say whether something is good or bad. It's to analyze the stories and try to offer some thoughts on what they might offer the reader in terms of making sense of the world. The reader of these critiques I have in mind is a college student who was assigned reading one of these stories, someone who's just looking for a foothold to help scale the project. There's an incredible dearth of that on the Internet. To the extent I'm capable of providing it, I'd like to try. These are serious stories, and they deserve to be taken seriously, which means they deserve a readership willing to put some effort into considering them. That's what I'd like to foster. There is a shocking lack of this kind of discussion on the Internet, possibly because of how self-damaging it is to offer this kind of thought.

If, along the way to considering the stories, I happen to say something that suggests I feel a story failed in some way, I hope the writers will consider that I'm actually trying to give the work the honest thought it deserves, not mindlessly parrot words about its greatness in the hopes I can one day hear similar words about my own work. A word or two of honesty shows your and your work respect.

The business doesn't encourage writers to write seriously about other writers. But the ecosystem desperately needs this kind of interaction in order to be healthy. I'm committed to writing about this year's BASS because I care about writing. I care enough to be unwisely honest.