Los Angeles, California
August 7, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is from X., our anonymous correspondent in Winnipeg. It’s the fourth in her ongoing series of letters to her ex-boyfriend Mike, about their thirteen-year-old son.

I’ve received enthusiastic email from readers about each of the letters we’ve published, but I have to say that no one produces a volume of response quite like X. I’m not sure if it’s the episodic nature of her letters, her quixotic choice to address them to someone she hasn’t heard from in a decade, or just the fact that her literary aim is so true.

If you are just joining us here at Open Letters, may I suggest that you give X.’s previous letters a read? There are links to them down the right side of today’s letter.

X.’s letter kicks off an entire week of open letters by and about parents and children. Mostly by parents, I confess, though we do have a letter from a twelve-year-old girl from Massachusetts coming up on Wednesday. On Friday, there will be a fifth installment from X.

Also: This is the final week of volume one of Open Letters. After Friday’s letter goes up, and Sunday’s weekly goes out to subscribers, Open Letters is going on hiatus for three weeks, until Labor Day. It’s really only a semi-hiatus: we will cease posting new letters and conversations every day, and no new weeklies will go out to subscribers – but there will still be a fever of activity here at OLHQ, as we retool, refurbish, and recharge.

To be specific:

We will be redesigning and restructuring the web site, in order to make it easier to navigate (it’s getting unwieldy). I especially want to make it easier for readers to use the archives.

We are contemplating setting up a discussion board, as well, where readers (and letter-writers, I hope) can have an unmediated dialogue about the letters, or anything else.

We’ll be looking for new ways to let readers who might enjoy Open Letters – as well as writers who might want to write for us – know that we’re here.

And we’ll be redesigning the look of the weekly magazine, and changing our mailing-list program to make it easier tosubscribe to the weekly, and to the daily reminder.

As always, I’d like your input on all of this. Reader feedback is the main way we’ve come to understand what we need to change, and how we might change it. If you have ideas for what we should do next, and how the site should evolve (especially in terms of its architecture), please write me, ateditor@openletters.net.

If by any chance you’d like to contribute more than your opinion, there’s plenty to do, especially if you know about things like, you know, web design, mail servers, discussion-board software, promotion, or PDF design. If you might be interested in contributing any of your time or your skills to Open Letters, please let me know.

In the meantime, enjoy this last week of the first round of Open Letters.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough