Los Angeles, California
July 14, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Andrew Wilson, the internet book-order guy at Dawson’s Books, an antiquarian bookstore here in L.A. Andrew sent me an email back on Canada Day (July 1); he’d read Cheryl Wagner’s interview with Sam and Zak, the voracious smokers, and had liked it, and he had a story he wanted to tell me about some kids in Plano, Texas, who broke into a mortuary trying to score some embalming fluid to smoke, and ended up smoking a human finger.

I noticed from the little signature thing at the bottom of his email that the bookstore where he works is only a few blocks from where I’m living, temporarily. I asked him what it was like where he worked, and he wrote back:

I worked at a machine shop before this, so the quiet is a relief, and the manager here, Francis, is running for mayor of L.A. If elected, he will be monitored constantly by video cameras streaming live to the web, to eliminate the possibility of secret backroom deals.

Which sounded like a good platform to me. And then the next thing Andrew did was send me today’s letter, about a morning in his neighborhood, which it turns out is also my neighborhood. He’s right, by the way, about calling Larchmont Village “the Quaintness.”

I haven’t had too many interactions with Angelenos in the month that I’ve been here. But yesterday brought two compelling ones: a late-night conversation with Andrew, the first time we’d spoken; and also an email I received in the afternoon from a reader named Alivia, who moved here recently from Chicago. I’ve been thinking about her letter ever since it arrived.

At first, she wrote, she thought Open Letters was a good read. But now, she said, she and her friends “feel it is too inbred, and the letters are beginning to have the appeal of a column in a newspaper….Lately, the letters published are hardly revealing, nor do they instill the voyeuristic thrill of reading what was meant for another.” She continued:

The best one to date is Chana Shvonne Williford’s letter on moving in with a new boyfriend. Now there’s a letter: personal, containing details I may not get, considering I do not know those involved. It is not concerned with the judgment of strange outside readers.

I will still subscribe to the site, because some of the letters are worth reading. I don’t want to sound negative, but I want to give you a heads-up. This is a good idea, maybe this is what you need to concentrate on keeping pure.

I don’t really agree with Alivia on the specifics – I think our correspondents all reveal themselves differently, and I like honest and engaging writing that is meant for publication as much as honest and engaging writing that is meant for the flames. I also tend to think the whole “keeping pure” idea can be a perilous road.

But Alivia’s letter stuck with me all day because it connects to a question that I ask myself often with regards to Open Letters. I believe that our readers divide into two groups. There are some readers who think of the site as a collection of first-person writing, done in many different styles, which just happen to appear in the form of letters. And then there are other readers who think of it as a site of letters, first and foremost, a voyeuristic idyll, a place to look over people’s shoulders and into their hearts.

I am, depending on the day, a member of both groups.

It’s an issue that comes up all the time. Just yesterday, in fact, I was registering Open Letters with Yahoo! They’d put Open Letters in the“correspondence” section of their Social Science directory, next to a site on letter-folding (see here, e.g., for the Florentine Letterfold) and a quite remarkable thing called Ghostletters, a mailing list where participants write one another letters in a variety of historical personae (already taken: P.T. Barnum, Wayne Gretzky, Winnie the Pooh, Harry Chapin, Baron Konrad the Larger, and Caterwampus, a demon).

In many ways, that’s extremely heady company, and I appreciate Yahoo! putting us anywhere. But that’s not what the “change form” that I submitted yesterday afternoon said. It said, “No, no, we’re amagazine. Put us with the big boys. Rightthere, next to the New Yorker.”

Alivia, I imagine, would not have been proud.

There is no easy answer to the question that her letter raises, needless to say. It is entangled in the bigger dilemma that compels many editors: whether it is nobler to publish the polished (and intelligent and imaginative and eloquent) prose of an established writer, or the raw and honest writing of an undiscovered talent.

It’s a problem that is a pleasure for an editor to face, of course. And the pages of Open Letters seems as good a place as any for that little question to work itself out. Or to start to.

I’m grateful to Alivia for making me think again about all this. If the rest of you have any thoughts on the matter, please write me ateditor@openletters.net; though I can’t guarantee that I’ll go on for this long in response to your letter.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough