June 28, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

When Ian Brown and I first started talking about our idea for Open Letters, back in the hope-filled early weeks of the twenty-first century, we agreed that the model we were hoping to emulate was the ideal letter from the ideal friend, what Ian later referred to in an email as “a personal communication from someone who can’t help observing the world about them, in precise and revealing detail, for no other reason than the great story they passionately need to tell.”

We assumed that most of our correspondents would be “writers,” people who were employed primarily in the sale of words, for whom Open Letters could be a way to express ideas and stories that didn’t fit within the confines of other magazines, newspapers, and journals.

But we were also hoping that we would attract a corps of writers who were not “writers” but who could write – lawyers, park rangers, high-school students, cops; anyone who had a story to tell, and an original voice to tell it in.

Which is why, once we started approaching writers, a few months after those first conversations, one of my first calls was to Noah Cowan. I’ve known Noah for about thirty years, since we were two-ish, and he has always been an exceedingly entertaining correspondent, especially in the last ten years, which he’s spent traveling the globe, attending film festivals and buying films for theToronto film festival, where he works as a programmer. (He also runs his own film distribution company, called Cowboy Booking International.)

He is, it is true, a published writer – he is a contributing editor of Filmmaker, as well as the author of “He Shoots, He Scores,” a short story about a romantic encounter between two hockey players. But despite those credits, he is to me a roving philosopher/entrepreneur/raconteur first, and a writer second. Which is one of the many reasons I’m glad he’s contributing to Open Letters.

In other news, our fleet of designers have finally created our first installment of responses from our readers, a selection of the mail we received last week. We’ll update that page once a week or so.

Tomorrow, a second letter from X, in Winnipeg, to Mike.

And please subscribe. It’s free.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough