Los Angeles, California
July 21, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Ian Brown. Ian is a writer and journalist and radio host in Toronto; he is also the co-founder of Open Letters.

During the year and a half that I was the editor of Saturday Night, Ian and I would meet for a drink every three or four months. We’d talk about articles he was writing, or might write, for the magazine – Ian authored two of the more memorable dispatches for Saturday Night’s Canadian Letters section – and then we’d talk about Disney World and writer’s block and art made out of Zoloft capsules and, always, the frustrations of institutional Canadian journalism.

After I left the magazine, last winter, Ian and I continued to talk. Over the course of a few evenings at a pub on Queen Street West in Toronto called the Munster House, while the snow fell outside, our conversations about writing and journalism slowly evolved from theoretical ranting into a concrete plan, a plan to start an online magazine of first-person writing in the form of personal letters. Since then, Ian’s continued to develop and explain the idea of Open Letters, not only to our writers, but to me, as well.

In other words, today’s letter is far from Ian’s first contribution to Open Letters, even though it’s the first one that has his name on it.

Ian’s letter marks the end of our week of open letters from the Open Letters editors; next week, another theme: life at work. Every letter we publish (along with the weekend conversation) will have something to do with the workplace. On tap: a letter from a physicist; a letter from a dishwasher; a letter from a substitute teacher; a conversation with a nineteen-year-old Earthlink tech-support guy; and more.

Before then, though: the fifth issue of the Open Letters weekly magazine will go out to subscribers by email on Sunday. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do; it’s free, it’s nicely laid out, it’s easy to print, it’s more portable than the tiniest Palm Pilot. As a subscriber in New Zealand wrote me yesterday,

I like taking mine home with me, and curling up on my bed with it. And my flatmate keeps stealing it, so I want to take another home for him to read too.

To subscribe, simply send a blank email to weekly@openletters.net. To read more about why we want you to subscribe to the weekly, and how the email subscription works, please visit a little page we callthe delivery.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough