June 24, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is not a letter at all. It is a conversation.

This is no accident. This was the plan from the very beginning: Monday through Friday we post letters, and on Saturday we post a conversation, an interview, a back-and-forth between an Open Letters correspondent and a worthy subject.

Today’s subject is worthy indeed. She is Sarah Jones, a student who is on the verge of completing the sixth grade at Shirley Street School in Toronto, Canada. She spoke with Deirdre Dolan, an Open Letters correspondent and a personal friend of Sarah’s. During the school year that is just now ending, Deirdre and Sarah hung out every Tuesday afternoon; the general pattern was that they would go see whatever teen movie had most recently opened at the Paramount, a gigantic, cinnamon-smelling multiplex in downtown Toronto, and then eat fast food and talk about what was up in the sixth grade.

In the course of their conversations this spring, Deirdre discovered that Sarah had recently become the most popular girl in her school. The editors of Open Letters, sensing a story, assigned her the interview. What she delivered is today’s conversation.

If you’re still looking for a reason tosubscribe to the weekly PDF version of Open Letters, consider this: it will contain photographs not only of Sarah, but of Chantelle and Jesse as well. The current price for a subscription? It is free.

Also: in a startling moment of serendipity, Open Letters HQ was graced yesterday by a visit from Scott Ritcher, a virtuoso of the interview form. Scott created K Composite, an incredibly innovative magazine of interviews, in the early nineties, when he was in his early twenties. It folded after four issues, and remained on hiatus until last year, when Scott revived it as a free bimonthly distributed throughout Louisville, Kentucky.

Some things have changed, Scott told me last night while he watched me set up a printer: he has employees now, and better computers, and an office on the top floor of an old building in downtown Louisville that also houses a private school. But the mission of the magazine remains the same as in its first incarnation: to publish in-depth interviews with non-celebrities, whom Scott asks questions like “How many times a day do you lie?”, “Tell your life story in three words or less,” and, in every single interview, “What is your favorite Atari game?”

(One more thing you should know about Scott Ritcher: last year, at the age of 29, he ran for mayor of Louisville, his home town. His platform included support for the construction of a monorail through the city. He captured in excess of 2 percent of the popular vote.)

K Composite is a giant-sized influence on Open Letters’s own weekly conversations. The aim of the conversations we will publish is the same as the aim of the letters: to provide glimpses into other people’s lives; to allow readers to read voices and stories they couldn’t find anywhere else; to tell, in an evolving, epistolary way, true tales of modern life.

Next Saturday, on Open Letters, you will be able to read an interview with two young death-metal musicians from Florida who smoke their own skin. And on Monday, we return to the form that got us where we are today: the letter. Monday’s is by Samantha Shapiro, from the Department of Lost Objects in Jerusalem.

Thank you for reading Open Letters in this, its first week on the planet. Tomorrow, the first issue of the weekly will go out to our subscribers; if you would like to join their ranks, for free, send a blank email toweekly@openletters.net. For more information on how subscriptions work, please read this.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough