1 Write the first paragraph of a letter you’d like to send either to another writer, living or dead, or to a fictional character.

or

2 Describe your experience with the new technology of correspondence: Twitter, e-mail, Facebook, etc.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting responses which appear in PEN America 12: Correspondences. We hope you’ll join the discussion.

Facebook makes me write -- at least a single line.

Dear Zora,
Did you know that you are buried in an unmarked grave and that Alice Walker went searching for that grave back in the 70s and helped to bring you back to life? Your words inspire, provoke, and live on in the hearts and minds of millions today.

Dear Ms. Carson,
Just like you I eat to live. I and trillions of sibs, ancestors, descendents … don’t even consider counting us; you’d fall down in a faint. Mine is a protozoan’s bliss: plunging through vessels, joining blood’s lukewarm spurt, nestling and multiplying with my fellows within a cell’s membrane. … And then we burst through that ragged container, and out we go again, bringing fever, chills, white fingers, indigo nails, red urine, and death.
Guilt? Don’t be an ass. Without swimming, swarming, and bursting through, I can’tlive. I require my host, rising in his ague, and I require the anopholine mosquito, who bites this sick giant and sucks us and cossets us in her salivary glands until she bites another. She keeps our generations generating.
We’ve been involved in this enterprise since Eden. No one knew we existed. But finally they discovered us and our power, that we were carried by a flying insect, they decided to hate Anopholina. So they drained her swamps and tried to block her with netting, but nothing worked against our tough old Nanny. Until – oh hateful day – a Swiss discovered Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, and it looked as if we were done for.
Anopholina and her sisters died, excuse the expression, like flies. And we within her died too, in our inconsequential way. As for our would-be hosts – they lived.
And then – oh blessed day – you arose from Foggy Bottom, you our Savior, a dowdy little lady with a mission, a lady in command of a lyrical prose. You convinced the world that Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane would be the end of birds, beasts, and brats. The stuff was banned. Anopholina, dead in most places but lurking still in our favorite continent, sat up and shook her wings. We yawned and jiggled. She flew and bit; we slipped into the new blood; all began again – lethargy, vomiting, gagging conclusion. Now, again, they die, like flies.
Your grateful if parasitic friend

Heartfelt ramifications! And many apologists for inserting your privacy!

Let me cut to the chaise: ye olde chervils at PENNE have asked me to impose a letter to a famous literary character and I can think of no one more endoscope, bewailing, or obsidianly obviate than you. You have always been my style-gorilla—the goddess at whose umbilical I worship. You could, with good treason, say I’m your biggest farm-girl. Your obsessed kewpie. But there is more, I confess. Perhaps as you have already deluded from the koi—if not submarine—tone of my epithet so far, my feelings for you go quaint beyond those of mere perspiration. Neigh! What I feel for you is downright lassitude—a sexual ergotism so bent and exploded I long for some consummé of my love. Infarction it: you have only to endow your head, or cock a snood at me, and I will pull off all your pretty crinklings and creosote, remove your glittering earwigs, and radish you on the spot. Are you shocked by such precipitation? Such defenestration? My politically indirect equestrian? Or are you, perhaps, already acquitted with the wishful placemats of Lebanese love? Snafu of Lisbon, you recall, accelerated same-sox passion in her dental, unforgettable varnishes. Yes, librarians everywhere are coming out of the quonset. It’s a hut! Snifters are donut for themselves. The Snark Ages are over. Can you be spongeiform in kind? O my dreamsicle-Malaprop!—like every lubber of English literacy, I worship your trans-pondent comic genie. You are immobile—a sublime module for us all. So let me bisque in your charms. Forget that allegory on the banks of the Nile—I blog of you. He’s nothing but a slimy green emission of perseverating dunk. Whereas, my sweetest doily, I am terse forever.

Clearly you are no different from the other students of your age who fail to recognize the moment when they should desist rather than plunge ludicrously onward. Would you be the buffoon of that Professor of Poetry and Eloquence who absurdly charged that the incident of Nathanael and his ill-fated love is “an allegory, a continuous metaphor”? Were you not listening when Registrar Heerbrand explained that the story of Lindhorst the salamander is “anything but incoherent or allegorical; rather, it is literally true”? Or when Lothario, the Professor of Esthetics, warned us away from those “downright fantasists who hatch and depict nothing but imaginary stuff”? By now you will no doubt have already footnoted me out of existence, so I shall simply reprimand you as I once reprimanded my dear Murr: “could you possibly have attained such wisdom that you can see so deeply into a writer’s soul, the most curious thing in the world?” Trouble me no further, &c.

Dear Oscar Wilde,

I guess you already know that when I read "The Happy Prince" in fifth grade - age 10 - my life was changed forever. But for over 30 years, I believed that the cruelly truncated version in my 5th-grade reader was the story in its entirety.

That was a shame - I guess there must have been some paranoia about separation of church and state in the educators' minds; in the version I read in school, the swallow died at the end, and the statue of the Happy Prince suffered a forever broken heart. Period. Full-stop.

Awful. I cried, and cried, and cried.

But - imagine my joy, over 30 years later, at discovering the real ending, as you had intended - not coldly lopped off. The swallow, and the Prince's heart, were rescued by angels and brought to Heaven. This, by direct order from God.

Now, that's more like it.

I love you,
Leslie MacPherson

Poetry has always had a slightly medicinal quality to it, for me. I have enjoyed it enormously at times. I like close reading. But there is almost always a faint aftertaste of self-improvement, even with Shakespeare—if only because when I read Shakespeare I think, “At last, I am reading Shakespeare!” And I have never had any facility or predilection for writing poetry.

Until I began to tweet. Now I will occasionally compose what would in normal circumstances be a short essay or memoir-ish riff—but on Twitter, which forces you into a realm of brevity. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but these enclosed 140-character boxes, within which one may express a thought, also insist on a kind of cadence, even if you have run-ons from one tweet to the next. This has introduced me to poetic composition in a way I never previously experienced.

I’m not saying my little numbered riffs (I call them postcards) are poems. But in composing them this way, as tweets, I have gotten inside a poetic process that was previously unknown to me. Sometimes I’ll even go nuts and rhyme.

1 Been thinking of that time Honus Wagner opened for Blur and Senseless Things, The Marquee, 1992. Our bassist, Jim Merlis, got us the gig.

2 Damon Albarn was very drunk. He climbed the rafters, hung upside down, shouting into a megaphone. I thought he might die.

3 At the after party I saw David Sparks. This was the era of David Sparks being at every club, every show. He was the hipster Zelig.

4 Tom Cushman left early to record vocals on a song called, “This One’s On Me.” Merlis and I hung around until the bitter end. Then…

5 We went outside and were accosted by young girls who had seen us on stage, asked if we knew Damon. We said yes. They asked us to sign…

6 …their jeans. As we did, I saw a man sitting in a mini-van down the street, watching. I could tell it was one of these girl’s father.

7 Damon Albarn drunk, Graham Coxon wearing a Honus Wagner shirt, David Sparks in glasses, Japanese girls in velvet. Looming above them...

8 ... the memory of that Dad in the mini-van, glowering as I signed his daughter’s jeans. I signed on the lower thigh. I thought, poor guy.

9 Now I’m a dad, too, with a little girl who rushes to strange men to grab their leg, and smile. I think, Oh God. What are you going to do?

10 That is a memory from the Marquee, 1992.

Dear Louise,

You don’t know me. But like thousands of girls, I was indelibly marked by Harriet, the feisty, sometimes cruel, always blisteringly intelligent character you created. Harriet the Spy was my first window into the complicated adult world, a world of gray areas, where we sometimes need to obscure the truth in the service of a larger good. And she was a girl who never gave in. As a considerably more tentative soul myself, I admired that immensely. Recently, I began reading the book to my eleven-year-old daughter, hoping to share the experience that had marked me so powerfully. We got about halfway through. But when Harriet lost her notebook and her friends turned on her, my daughter's eyes filled with tears and she said, “I hate this book.” When I pressed her as to why—we had enjoyed the first half immensely—she said, “They were so mean! They stole her tomato sandwich.” We’re taking a break from reading the book now, and I’m sad that my daughter is not embracing it the way I did. But her reaction is a testament to how powerful and beautifully written your novel is. Nearly fifty years after its publication, it is still piercing the hearts of young girls.

Dear Fowler (I know you would never want me to call you Thomas),

I saw you crying in the men’s room of the American Legation, when finally you realized you would lose the woman who is all you understand of peace. I know that feelings stick in you more jaggedly, more deeply than in many people, because you have been trained, by your society and yourself, always to play the man of disengagement. Your creator has even given the title of your story to the other man, your rival in love and politics, your parricidal usurper, the Quiet American. But I hope you know how deeply you have helped some of us who wonder how to respond to the world, not with theories or solutions but with a trembling, ambiguous humanity and even love, however much we try to doubt the two, or keep them to ourselves. I hope you see that you have taught us about what involvement in the larger world really calls for, and how to see our insufficiency towards it, even as we pretend to be beyond illusion. I know that you live only with an awareness of your failings and that you helped engineer—such is your self-destructive nature—the death of the man who was probably the only person you could call a “friend.” I know your honesty makes you rue even your successes and find reflections of your guilt in every face. But how I wish you could see that failure, treachery, detachment—all the things you’re guilty of—show us, as in a negative, all the things we most poignantly need in life. It’s not that you’re a hero; but, with the aid of the man who found you in a dark corner of himself, you’ve shown us what conscience means, and real concern for the globe. Every time I go out to Ethiopia, or Yemen, or California, you’re the one who tells me how to act. I suppose I’m trying—or beginning—to say that you have helped make the world less lonely (for us, if never for yourself).

Dear Sigmund Freud,

Sorry to bother you, but I have a quick question. It concerns apples. In The Interpretation of Dreams, you mention “a boil at the base” of your “scrotum.” The boil, you say, “had grown big as an apple.” (Thanks, by the way, for pointing to your perineum, that oft-neglected limbo-zone between genitals and anus.) I wonder why you compare your boil to an apple. Were you remembering Adam and Eve’s apple, or Newton’s apple—or William Tell’s apple, balanced on his victim-son’s head? In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, apples appear twice. First, you write, “My daughter bit into an apple and pulled a nasty face.” Second, you allude to “Schiller’s William Tell,” who “hesitated for a long time before shooting the apple from his son’s head…” Did William Tell’s hesitation resemble Hamlet’s hesitation? What unknown avenues do your apples open? Why apples?

My mother, who turns sixty-nine this year, will never learn how to use email. It’s one of these things you know. We talk over the phone. I don’t get it, people who can email with their mothers. These people make me jealous. They seem so modern. My mother’s older than their mothers, was born in a different country. Etc.

Sometimes I dream of email. I see myself at a desk, typing, moving the cursor around. I’ve had this dream a couple of times. The desk will be different but everything else is usually the same. The seamless divide between my reality and dreams. Sometimes a friend will email or instant message me her dream (it’s always a female friend, never a male friend, who feels compelled to share these dreams of me, with me). It’s nice to hear from them, but the dreams are always a little unsettling. Again with the seamless divide. You tell your dream. But what are the parts you aren’t telling, that weird shit you have to keep to yourself?

The other day a friend instant-messaged me her dream. We were together, in her dream, possibly dating. Together and at an event. Beyond that she couldn’t remember. She made sure to mention that what she did remember, she remembered while driving. Driving to her new job at a local community college. It was nice to hear from her. Talking to her made me feel romantic, and slightly resentful. I noticed she made a lot of typos. We hadn’t spoken in a year, not since she had moved away, where it was cheaper and there were fewer memories to make her feel uncomfortable. I asked how she was, whether she was happy, and she affirmed that, yes, she was happy, and for a moment we seemed the same as ever, the same kind of people bent on making themselves as miserable as possible. It was clear what we shared. We kept on instant messaging. She asked me what it was like outside. I looked at the gray building outside my bedroom window and tried to think of how to answer.

Dear M. Proust,

For a long time I have had the third volume of In Search of Lost Time by my bedside. I’m still near the beginning, where Mme de Guermantes waves at the young Marcel from her box in the theater, and Marcel, who has, up until that point, thought of Mme de Guermantes only as a bit of human heraldry, suddenly becomes infatuated with her as a person, and finds ways to run into her, so that again and again she’s obliged to acknowledged his presence, to her own great annoyance, doubtless. I’ve been reading that scene for years now. I like it enormously: as with so many other scenes in the first two volumes of your great work, it’s built around a reversal, or a system of reversals. Mme de Guermantes is distant then close, aloof then friendly; Marcel is sensible then foolish; the actress performing in the theater that night turns out to be great because she adds nothing at all to the text of the play. Everything is seen one way, then another; everything is constantly unfolding, so that the real mystery, from my point of view, is how it could all fit into a book of any size, even one as long as In Search of Lost Time. And yet every time I pick up Le Côté de Guermantes—I’m reading you in French, to prove to myself that I still can—I fall asleep. Why? I think it’s because the time you wrote about is hard to come by. Communication technologies have fractured my attention; just in the course of writing this paragraph I’ve stopped twice to check my email and downloaded an album from iTunes. Sometimes it seems to me that I don’t even know where to look for your time: like the ten, or eleven, or twenty-six extra dimensions posited by string theorists, it hides beyond experience, beyond the possibility of experience. To get to it, I’d have to crawl through a wormhole into another kind of space, where my attention would finally be complete, and I would see the world in its unity, its complex unfolding… that, at least, is what I think as I read the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes again, in the instant before I fall asleep.

In narratives of leaving and return, the past is a precious nugget, to be carefully uncovered. Or else it invades with a melodramatic bang: A pack of letters is found in the attic; old lovers reunite after decades apart. The inaccessibility of the past is the scaffolding that supports the mythic dimension of personal narratives, allowing for self-reinvention.

“Social networking” is an earthquake. Instead of careful prospecting and strategic returns, it offers catastrophic collapse. The garbage from the attic comes crashing through the immaculate ceiling of the present in an ugly heap. I couldn’t stay away from Odnoklassniki.ru, a Russian site that sorts users by
school and years attended.


Remember me??? We’re old now, huh. Winking emoticon. How is New York? You use Skype? Smiley emoticon.


S. was good at math, and thus had my sympathy. He also boxed. Did children box? Perhaps I’m confusing one violent sport for another. But his nose had been broken in two places, lending his face a deranged expression. Now, his dark hair is thinning. His cubist nose casts a shadow over his upper lip. He sits at an
office desk wearing a blue tie.


Why do you want to talk to me, S.? Do you remember when you used to pin me down and pummel me in the face? I was relieved when retarded K. joined our class, because you switched to beating her and left me alone. Are you still prone to fits? We used to joke that N., the pregnant geography teacher, would miscarry,
because you daily scared the living crap out of her.


I await his reply.


Surprised emoticon. I can’t remember any of this! I hear you wrote a book! I’m in publishing now.


I hear from a skeletal woman dressed in furs, formerly a fellow fat kid. I remember her parents’ leopard-spotted bedspread that she was not allowed to touch; we sat on the floor and listened to the Scorpions. I hear from an obese man whose gallery of photos shows him raising a beer mug at a corporate Oktoberfest; my first-grade best friend, my first love. I hear from B., “the other Jew” in my grade. He sends me a link to his LiveJournal. The first post I read is a joke: “What are those dark specs on the market’s glass roof? No, it’s not bird shit—it’s Tadzhik gasterbeiter window washers.” I de-friend him.


As a Jew, how can you be such a fascist? Sad emoticon.

It’s not about being a Jew. It’s about being a native Muscovite. We can disagree and still be friends. Smiley emoticon. Do you Skype?


I don’t reply. But the zombie of my teenage self crashes loudly from the attic, nearly flattening me: I was in tenth grade; I had just received a letter from my American pen pal. This envelope was torn, which was not unusual—mail carriers often looked for money or gum or pretty cards in foreign mail. I took out the letter in the stuffy boredom of physics class, making sure to rustle the pages; not too many people received mail from abroad, and I was desperate for a higher spot in the incomprehensible pecking order of high school. I found the letter riddled with doodles of the Star of David and insults in childish handwriting. “The ovens of Buchenwald are waiting for you,” one read. The mail carrier had probably let her kid help with her route, and the kid had been experimenting with chauvinism. “Buchenwald” was easy to spell in phonetic Russian; the scribbled sentiments weren’t any different from the content of nationalist papers sold in pedestrian underpasses. Still, I began to cry, loudly. Like a vapid Hollywood heiress who gets her fifteen minutes of fame from a psychotic break or an overdose, I finally had my classmates’ attention. They crowded around me, offering pats and hugs, passing the letter around with gasps and ohs.

Over the years I had been free to reinterpret this event as I wished: my tears as genuine shock, my classmates as caring friends. The uncanny faces on my screen remind me of the shameful pleasure I derived from my performance. I never looked at Odnoklassniki again.

I signed up for Facebook. My profile picture was Henry Roth.

I think of my children, who will never know escape. Their past will never acquire a mythical dimension—their friends and lovers won’t turn into heroes, their enemies won’t transform into demons. No matter where they live, they’ll be able to return to the doorways of their past in Google’s “street view.” A simple login will open the door to a stuffy cell, all the people they’ve ever known sitting inside, serving life sentences together.

Dear Mr. Hannah,

One morning many years ago, early, too early for a hung-over narcissistic nineteen-year-old cretin like me, our intense young college literature instructor, a man with crisp trousers and the tight but slightly permissive haircut of a Coast Guard officer, chalked a series of diabolical diagrams on the board: mythos, dianoia, thought, thought-content. The entire lesson seemed ingeniously designed to menace and finally dismantle people like me, otherwise known as those who have not done the reading. Eventually the instructor caught me drowsing, snapped something mean and sporty in my direction, the bark of the coach who maybe doesn’t see the buried potential in his new recruit at all. Later he took me aside after class and asked why I was there. I told him I wanted to write literature, figured learning how to think about it was a good way to start.

“Let’s see some stuff,” he said.

I’m not sure he ever read whatever nonsense I gave him, but when I saw him next he told me to read Airships. “Barry Hannah,” he said.

The man ruined and saved me, and I can’t even remember his name.

But Mr. Hannah, your name has been thrumming in me ever since. I was a Jewish kid from New Jersey. My literary heroes were meant to be Roth and Bellow and maybe Updike, for ethnic variety. Their accomplishments rightly endure. But your books burned me down. You sang, you startled, you dreamed, you mourned and exulted and laughed with new sounds, new sentences. Perhaps they bore the magic of the languages your character Ned Maximus (“thirty-eight and somewhat Spanish”) speaks: “white, Negro, some Elizabethan, some Apache.” And no matter how reckless your leaps, your sentences, your paragraphs, like tiny genius gymnasts, stuck every landing. I’ve known a lot of Southern writers who understood deeply the what of your writing—the fishing, the drinking, that sense of being both enriched and hounded by geography and history, the hypocrisies of the over-cultivated white Southern identity, the sad hilarity and nobility of nearly everything, the ongoing crucifixion by the truth, as one of your more famous stories has it—with greater nuance than I could ever manage. Sometimes I even needed a diagram. But the how of your work was a perfect and enthralling wonder. For an apprentice writer your example was both a hand up and a knife to the neck. Such is the double bind of meeting your master. Most people emulate a career, a reputation, but your many acolytes yearn to understand how so much poetry and story can bloom so swiftly on a page. I wish I’d written you sooner, or met you, as all have attested to your generosity and wit. Perhaps I did write you once, a decade ago, but I was younger and my intentions were not pure. I believe I hoped you’d read my first book. But that was never the point. The point was for us to read yours, to dare ourselves to live up to the motto of Mr. Maximus (AKA Maximum Ned): “Ride, fly, penetrate, loiter.” Yes, this is really just another fan letter, and maybe such drool means nothing to a dead man. Maybe it’s a fake, sick thing to write letters to the dead. But your books live on and we serve them now.

I’m embarrassed to say that back in the early days of Twitter, when a journalist called me to ask what I thought of the service, I had only caustic things to say. I described it as an adult version of a baby monitor, thereby immediately infuriating almost every twitterer who read the comment. But I’ve loved aphorisms for decades and soon realized that Twitter was the perfect place to become a public aphorist. For a year or so now, I’ve been posting an aphorism or two every day online, and the gratification I get from doing so is embarrassing. It’s genuinely far more fun than writing a book: the response is immediate, as is the criticism—and the contact is direct, without mediation from reviewers.

The moral, as always, is that we have to find ways of making technology work for us. The suspicion we sometimes have when a new technology is launched and journalists are enthusiastic about it stems from a fear that we’re not going to be able to make this invention add anything to our own experiences. But the best inventions tend to have flexibility built into them, they should be able to accommodate a whole range of responses—not least, some idle philosophical maxims.

Dear Scheherazade,

What would we have done without you? Bookish, beautiful, and sly, you knew your mind and you knew his, and your knowledge gave you power, not only to save your own life, but other lives. You held him—willing captive to your voice. Night after night you tutored a king and slowly his mind changed. Without knowing it, he became someone else. That is the magic of stories. They become us. And so the stories you told him you also told me, and like him I would forget you were there because I sank so deeply into your tales of lovers and thieves and sailors and enchantments, and now those stories are in me, too. Thank you.

With Undying Admiration,

Siri Hustvedt