Dear Mr. Dickens, You’re great! Love, me.
by Suzanne Strempek Shea
FEBRUARY 22, 2011 TAGS:
The lack of forwarding addresses didn’t stop a group of acclaimed writers and poets from penning fan letters to their deceased literary heroes.
Thirteen such missives fill the very first pages of the very first issue of The New Guard, a journal founded recently by 41-year-old Knightville, Maine, writer Shanna Miller McNair after two years of work creating her state’s first independent multi-genre review. That included mulling that all-important first impression made on the reader as the issue is opened.
“It is part of TNG’s mission to put newcomers in print alongside established writers and I wanted to find a fun way to include a lot of well-known writers,” Miller McNair says. “I had a different idea kicking around, for a virtual roundtable discussion about experiment and narrative and how they work in juxtaposition. But the thing is, I thought it would be dry.”
So this fall she created her own mini-roundtable, brainstorming ideas with noted popular fiction writer Scott Wolven, her mentor at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast master of fine arts program in creative writing.
“I guess I always think of dead writers as somehow looking over living writers and the letter seemed like a natural thing,” Wolven says. “I was trying to think of something that would leave a literary mark – where would we be without the interviews of The Paris Review? So [the letters might be] a little something to give the journal something different but possibly important.”
Miller McNair agreed, calling the idea a stroke of genius.
“Not only did the fan letters create a vehicle for several writers to contribute something short and passionate, there was now also a kind of introductory nod from those of the established Guard at large. So I placed them together in the front of the review to kick off the book with a nod to our past writers, as present writers nod to TNG.”
Taking up the invitation to kick off the 190-page journal of poetry and prose were essayist and critic Sven Birkerts, who writes to Julio Cortazar, an Argentinean novelist who influenced a generation of Latin writers – along with Michigan-native Latvian-rooted Birkerts. "How do we measure an influence?" Birkerts asks Cortazar. "Hard to say. At one point, decades ago, you were everywhere in my prose. I could go to early pages now and mark the phrases out one after the next. That changed. I flatter myself to think that I grew a voice of my own. Does that mean I have shed you, lost you? No, more likely I have somehow metabolized your influence."
Novelist Boman Desai wrote to Agatha Christie - or "My Dear Dame Agatha," as the man who signs himself "Your acolyte" addresses her: "I beg your pardon, but I speak with the greatest affection and admiration though you would be the first to pooh-pooh what I say." Desai chastises her for considering herself "not really an author" despite having sold more than four billion books, being the most translated author ever and the writer of a play, The Mousetrap which opened in 1952 and has been performed more than 23,000 times. "You stand on the shoulders of Shakespeare as much as he smiles over yours," Desai writes,” and I remain floundering in the wake of your red herrings."
Poet and writer Maxine Kumin begins her letter, to W.H. Auden, with the familiar "Wystan" ("If I may") and then ponders the fact of "this aging feminist taking a dead white male as a role model!" But she does, citing as her reason Auden's trochees, trimeter and tetrameter, "that seamless melding of ideational content and metaphor. That was how I wanted to sound someday."
Poet, writer and undertaker Thomas Lynch tells pediatrician William
Carlos Williams of two boys he embalmed early in his career, brothers who shared a casket ("the one I could not charge their father for"), wearing OshKosh B'Gosh bib overalls mail-ordered by their mother at Christmas. Lynch, then not 30, remembers four decades later looking out the window for relief from the parents' pain at their first viewing, searching for "something, anything to let my gaze seize upon which everything could be said to depend because looking back into the space I was occupying, that moment, with those damaged parents and those drowned little boys, so sweet,
so cold, was, as you know yourself, Doctor, impossible." He knows, because,
Lynch notes, Williams did the same searching in his own work, both in his
physician's office and at his writing desk.
And Wolven writes to his hero, legendary crime novelist Jim Thompson, asking what he's drinking these days "south of heaven," reminding him that Stephen King once wrote forwards to Thompson’s books ("you should keep that in mind, when you feel down"), and including in his imaginary piece of mail a typewriter with extra ribbons, and four reams of typing paper. "It's this world, and then the fireworks," Wolven reminds the subject of his letter, "and I need one more Jim Thompson before I fold my hand."
“Jim Thompson is a particular favorite of mine,” Wolven says, “and I had just seen the re-make of The Killer Inside Me, so he was on my mind. Probably, knowing Jim Thompson (make that any writer), it would have been much appreciated if I had sent some money.”
Miller McNair calls the letters capricious yet extremely serious. “They are fan letters but also essays, poems, and works of fiction.”
She notes Adam Braver’s message to Wallace Stevens. Lewis Robinson’s to Emily Dickinson, Tom Grimes’ to Frank Conroy.
“Most have some kind of epiphanic moment,” she says, “which I think lies at the heart of writing.”
Finding participants wasn’t difficult for the woman energetically connected to the writing world and with a father – celebrated writer, poet and scholar Wesley McNair - long in the business. She credits Boston-area author and poet Richard Hoffman with helping locate many on the list that also includes Annie Finch, John Goldbach, Josip Novakovich and Afaa Michael Weaver.
Miller McNair’s name is not included, and, even if The New Guard publishes more such fan letters in the future (whether it’ll be a regular feature is “top secret,” Miller McNair says), don’t look for it. She’s busy with her studies, promoting the first issue (new guardreview.com) and soliciting donations to ensure its future. Nor does she believe that editors should publish their own work. Her dream subject: Kathy Acker. “I would write to Kathy Acker, because she is a great experimenter and the spirit of her work is unlike anything I’ve ever read.”
Not unlike the chance to unseal a few letters to the dead.
Suzanne Strempek Shea, the author of eight books, contributes regularly to Obit.
Thirteen such missives fill the very first pages of the very first issue of The New Guard, a journal founded recently by 41-year-old Knightville, Maine, writer Shanna Miller McNair after two years of work creating her state’s first independent multi-genre review. That included mulling that all-important first impression made on the reader as the issue is opened.“It is part of TNG’s mission to put newcomers in print alongside established writers and I wanted to find a fun way to include a lot of well-known writers,” Miller McNair says. “I had a different idea kicking around, for a virtual roundtable discussion about experiment and narrative and how they work in juxtaposition. But the thing is, I thought it would be dry.”
So this fall she created her own mini-roundtable, brainstorming ideas with noted popular fiction writer Scott Wolven, her mentor at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast master of fine arts program in creative writing.
“I guess I always think of dead writers as somehow looking over living writers and the letter seemed like a natural thing,” Wolven says. “I was trying to think of something that would leave a literary mark – where would we be without the interviews of The Paris Review? So [the letters might be] a little something to give the journal something different but possibly important.”
Miller McNair agreed, calling the idea a stroke of genius.
“Not only did the fan letters create a vehicle for several writers to contribute something short and passionate, there was now also a kind of introductory nod from those of the established Guard at large. So I placed them together in the front of the review to kick off the book with a nod to our past writers, as present writers nod to TNG.”
Taking up the invitation to kick off the 190-page journal of poetry and prose were essayist and critic Sven Birkerts, who writes to Julio Cortazar, an Argentinean novelist who influenced a generation of Latin writers – along with Michigan-native Latvian-rooted Birkerts. "How do we measure an influence?" Birkerts asks Cortazar. "Hard to say. At one point, decades ago, you were everywhere in my prose. I could go to early pages now and mark the phrases out one after the next. That changed. I flatter myself to think that I grew a voice of my own. Does that mean I have shed you, lost you? No, more likely I have somehow metabolized your influence."
Novelist Boman Desai wrote to Agatha Christie - or "My Dear Dame Agatha," as the man who signs himself "Your acolyte" addresses her: "I beg your pardon, but I speak with the greatest affection and admiration though you would be the first to pooh-pooh what I say." Desai chastises her for considering herself "not really an author" despite having sold more than four billion books, being the most translated author ever and the writer of a play, The Mousetrap which opened in 1952 and has been performed more than 23,000 times. "You stand on the shoulders of Shakespeare as much as he smiles over yours," Desai writes,” and I remain floundering in the wake of your red herrings."
Poet and writer Maxine Kumin begins her letter, to W.H. Auden, with the familiar "Wystan" ("If I may") and then ponders the fact of "this aging feminist taking a dead white male as a role model!" But she does, citing as her reason Auden's trochees, trimeter and tetrameter, "that seamless melding of ideational content and metaphor. That was how I wanted to sound someday."
Poet, writer and undertaker Thomas Lynch tells pediatrician William
Carlos Williams of two boys he embalmed early in his career, brothers who shared a casket ("the one I could not charge their father for"), wearing OshKosh B'Gosh bib overalls mail-ordered by their mother at Christmas. Lynch, then not 30, remembers four decades later looking out the window for relief from the parents' pain at their first viewing, searching for "something, anything to let my gaze seize upon which everything could be said to depend because looking back into the space I was occupying, that moment, with those damaged parents and those drowned little boys, so sweet,
so cold, was, as you know yourself, Doctor, impossible." He knows, because,
Lynch notes, Williams did the same searching in his own work, both in his
physician's office and at his writing desk.
And Wolven writes to his hero, legendary crime novelist Jim Thompson, asking what he's drinking these days "south of heaven," reminding him that Stephen King once wrote forwards to Thompson’s books ("you should keep that in mind, when you feel down"), and including in his imaginary piece of mail a typewriter with extra ribbons, and four reams of typing paper. "It's this world, and then the fireworks," Wolven reminds the subject of his letter, "and I need one more Jim Thompson before I fold my hand."
“Jim Thompson is a particular favorite of mine,” Wolven says, “and I had just seen the re-make of The Killer Inside Me, so he was on my mind. Probably, knowing Jim Thompson (make that any writer), it would have been much appreciated if I had sent some money.”
Miller McNair calls the letters capricious yet extremely serious. “They are fan letters but also essays, poems, and works of fiction.”
She notes Adam Braver’s message to Wallace Stevens. Lewis Robinson’s to Emily Dickinson, Tom Grimes’ to Frank Conroy.
“Most have some kind of epiphanic moment,” she says, “which I think lies at the heart of writing.”
Finding participants wasn’t difficult for the woman energetically connected to the writing world and with a father – celebrated writer, poet and scholar Wesley McNair - long in the business. She credits Boston-area author and poet Richard Hoffman with helping locate many on the list that also includes Annie Finch, John Goldbach, Josip Novakovich and Afaa Michael Weaver.
Miller McNair’s name is not included, and, even if The New Guard publishes more such fan letters in the future (whether it’ll be a regular feature is “top secret,” Miller McNair says), don’t look for it. She’s busy with her studies, promoting the first issue (new guardreview.com) and soliciting donations to ensure its future. Nor does she believe that editors should publish their own work. Her dream subject: Kathy Acker. “I would write to Kathy Acker, because she is a great experimenter and the spirit of her work is unlike anything I’ve ever read.”
Not unlike the chance to unseal a few letters to the dead.
Suzanne Strempek Shea, the author of eight books, contributes regularly to Obit.
RELATED CONTENT
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
RELATED CONTENT
