On his own letter, and on self-conscious vs. unselfconscious writing.
June 21, 2000
Los Angeles, California
Dear Readers,
Today’s letter is, in fact, by me. I wrote it a little more than a month ago, soon after I moved to San Francisco, when I was still trying to get a handle on what these open letters would read like. I thought I’d better try to write one myself.
The bookstore in question is A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, on Van Ness, in San Francisco; I stopped in there one afternoon, looking for Ben Metcalf’s essay in Best American Essays 1999, and after reading it and forming a brand-new appreciation for Ben Metcalf, I wandered off into the plays section, and the rest is Open Letters history.
Ben and I, by the way, soon thereafter embarked on a fairly contentious email exchange about Open Letters and the process of editing. Here’s how it started: I invited him to write something for the magazine, and suggested that he could maybe fire it off in an hour or so. He didn’t like that idea, believing, quite reasonably, that the sort of writing he did required time and care.
Things developed: I thought he was being too uptight about the editorial process; he thought I was being too laid-back. It got kind of intense, and kind of deep, dredging up my bad memories of worrying a piece to death at Harper’s Magazine, where I used to work and Ben still does; and his bad memories of churning out bad, “automatic” writing, as he put it, in college.
But after a few speedy dispatches, we ended up at something approaching agreement, or at least détente. This is something Ben wrote in his last email in the exchange, which I liked:
My hope has always been that the process of becoming a better writer is circular, so that we move from free and unselfconscious to self-conscious and thereby more constricted (and constructed) and eventually, once most of those self-conscious moves become internalized, to freer writing once again.
Which is precisely what I was trying to say.
Ben, by the way, promises he’ll write a letter, a careful one, this summer. In the meantime, check out his essay on the Mississippi. It’s a great piece of autobiographical geography.
Yours truly,
