On Lynn’s letter, and on letters vs. magazine articles.

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Lynn Crosbie, a Toronto poet and novelist. I met her last autumn, early in the NHL season, when my colleague Naomi brought her by the offices of the magazine where she and I worked, for a story meeting.

Lynn, Naomi said, would like to interview Curtis Joseph, the goaltender for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

As the three of us talked, sitting around a large, oak desk (Lynn wearing a quite stylish poncho), it became clear that Lynn’s interest in Curtis extended beyond the professional. To put it in sixth-grade terms: She didn’t just like Curtis Joseph, she liked him liked him.

Lynn later emailed me some selections from a poem cycle she was writing (“In the Crease: Poems for Curtis Joseph”) about a thinly disguised protagonist, Tina, and her “developing obsession” with the Leafs’ goaltender. (“Tina’s sports enthusiasm is genuine,” Lynn wrote in a grant application to the Toronto Arts Council, which she passed on to me along with the poems, “while her devotion to the goalie is an arcane extension of aTiger Beat world view.”)

The verses she sent were fine indeed, in the grand tradition of Canadian hockey poetry:

The playoffs haven’t started yet & there is time enough to memorize each of his moves – the squats & splits, the crab-like shuffle & fall Time enough to think of Curtis Joseph & shimmer, as if electrified.

Needless to say, I wanted to hear more.

Trouble ensued, though – the Maple Leafs played hard to get, refusing all of our requests for an interview (first the excuse was the all-star break, then a slump; then the playoffs were approaching). In the midst of the Leafs’ evasive maneuvers, I left the magazine and it went on hiatus for a while, essentially rendering Lynn’s story dead; it was Shakespearean, almost, the way unseen forces were conspiring to keep Lynn and Curtis apart.

And then in May, as the playoffs began, I gave Lynn a call to see whether her developing obsession was still developing, and to see whether she might be interested in contributing something to Open Letters on the subject.

Today’s letter is the happy result of that conversation.

The whole experience helped me understand a bit better why these days, the Letter is more appealing to me as a journalistic form than the Magazine Article.

Here’s a thing that happens sometimes when you’re assigned to write a magazine article: you can tell the story engagingly to dinner companions; you can write great letters about your assigned subject to your friends, but when you sit down to write the “article,” something goes wrong: the stories all come out less entertaining; the prose becomes more clotted; the point-of-view grows hazy. It’s happened to me as a writer, and I’ve watched it happen to writers I’ve worked with as an editor.

One editors’ trick I started using a while ago (I think a lot of magazine editors do this) is to ask a thwarted writer to start off by writing me a letter on the topic. What comes out is often much more fluid, funny, on-topic, and well-structured than a formal magazine article. (It was that strategy, in fact, that led to what Tom Wolfe calls the first example of the New Journalism: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which emerged when Esquire (I think) simply published Wolfe’s notes toward an article on stock-car racers, rather than the article itself, which Wolfe believed was impossible to write.)

Which is why I’m convinced that Lynn’s letter is vastly more engaging a read than any magazine profile that might have come out of our meeting. It’s not only more expressive of her deep and complicated feelings for her subject Curtis Joseph: it’s also a better reflection of the facts of the Curtis Joseph Story.

If you’d like to read more of Lynn’s work, you can buy her most recent book. She’ll also be returning to Open Letters later this summer. As for Curtis: he’ll be back in the fall, in the crease.

Please come back tomorrow. And subscribe. It’s free.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough