San Francisco, California
October 20, 2000

Dear Readers,

What with all of the hubbub this week over our new handheld edition and the fact that we’re now in a few bookstores, I worry that we might be forgetting about our reliable old PDF subscription. It may not have a “hot sync” option, or its own dedicated “channel,” but it remains my favorite way to read Open Letters, for reasons you can read about here. If you haven’t subscribed to the weekly, you can do so, for free, by sending a blank email to weekly@openletters.net; your first issue, in its attractive and flexible PDF form, will be winging its way to your email queue on Sunday morning, ready for you to print out and carry around wherever you go: the original handheld device.

As weekly subscriber Eva Buttacavoli-Van Hees of Miami, Florida, wrote us earlier this week:

I just finished reading the Oct. 15 issue. Wow again. The weekly format is so nice to download at the office and take outside for a Monday afternoon smoke break.

We couldn’t agree more. Although please note that smoking is bad for you.

For more musing about distribution, please click here to read an interview about our plans and schemes that I did on Wednesday (by email) with a woman named Teresa Brusky, who works for a web site about email lists called List-Tips. For some reason, I felt obliged to use words like “periodicity.”

And if you would like to sample an issue of the weekly before you subscribe, please note that we’ve just updated ourback issues page. From that page, you can now download the first six issues of volume two, as well as all of volume one.

There is news, a little further down the page, about the first-ever Open Letters T-shirt, which arrived yesterday by van in the New York metropolitan area. But, first, about today’s letter: it is by Sheila Heti, a student at the University of Toronto and a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in McSweeney’s and Toronto Life and Blood + Aphorisms, and whose first collection of short stories, “The Middle Stories,” is due out next spring.

As Sheila makes rampantly clear in her letter, she has mixed feelings about the idea of revealing anything about herself publicly (as she does, arguably, in her open letter). I wrote her yesterday to ask what I should say about her in this editor’s letter, and she wrote back:

It sure doesn’t matter. All I know is that I feel such dread about printing this. But that’s not your fault. Just reading the piece over has made me grimace.

Your reaction to Sheila’s letter may differ; mine certainly did.

As Sheila and I were corresponding about her last few editing changes (she wanted to change “a ten-thousand-mile-wide gorgon-filled moat” to “a thousand-mile-wide gorgon-filled moat,” and I couldn’t argue; that’s a big moat), I was busy hanging my head in shame for what I did late Wednesday night to the first paragraph of Lauren Zalaznick’s letterabout an email that went astray. For some reason, I changed

All the people I work with know that the best way to get me is to email me, not call me, and they’re all expecting that I’ll have looked at whatever they send before Monday.

to

All the people I work with know that the best way to get me is to email me, not call me, and they’re all I’ll have looked at expecting that whatever they send before Monday.

which I think we can all agree is worse, and not better. I don’t know why I did it. Sorry, Lauren. And thanks to Liz in Toronto and Rich in Seattle for setting me straight.

The first-ever Open Letters T-shirt, hand-made in Louisiana and featuring Craig Taylor’s classic “envelope” illustration, will appear on stage tonight at the Rising Café, in Park Slope, Brooklyn (5th Ave. and Sackett St.), on the back of bassist/vocalist/Open Letters subscriber Jake Springfield, of the New Orleans “post-rock” combo Jai Alai, which also includes M.C. Hushpuppy. The T-shirt, and the band, take the stage at 8:30; it’s part of the CMJ festival. If you are in the vicinity of Brooklyn, please go and show your support for the T-shirt. Someday, perhaps, there will more of them.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough