Los Angeles, California
July 11, 2000

Dear Readers,

Yesterday’s Open Letters field trip to Disneyland, though successful in the immediate, log-flume-and-hot-dog sense, has compelled me towards brevity, here, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have never met Tabatha Southey, author of today’s letter. I have, however, admired her as a writer and a mother ever since she published a mean and funny article (in the form of a letter, no less) in the National Post about how much her young sons loved, and she despised, the Swiss Family Robinson. And so when Ian Brown and I first began casting around for open-letter-writers, we tried to track her down, but found the task unexpectedly difficult. She became a talisman, a grail, an unreachable— and then she just wandered into Ian’s living room one night, and that seemed like a good sign.

I love the way she writes about her not-quite-intact family, and life in Toronto. I hope she’ll do more of it for Open Letters. And I trust she’ll take these sentiments entirely the wrong way.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough