Milford, Connecticut
November 9, 2000

Dear Readers,

Tuesday night in my editor’s letter, I said that we’d feature Michael Welch’sletter (about staying up all night with Al Gore) as our main event “until Thursday morning, at which point we’ll abandon our coverage of the presidential election, and move on. Just like America.”

America, however, isn’t quite ready to leave this particular election behind, and so neither are we. Our election coverage continues.

Today’s letter was actually written on Monday. It was one of a series of emails being sent back and forth, trailing cc’s, among a group of American-politics junkies, mostly Democrats, who were anticipating the election on Tuesday and arguing, as Democrats tend to do, about Ralph Nader. At one point during the debate, Kevin Baker, a novelist and historian in New York, offered up an email that was something of a departure from the debate: a stream-of-consciousness meditation on the long-term results of the election. It’s that email that we’re running as today’s open letter.

Kevin’s letter is a bit of a departure for Open Letters, too. I frequently tell potential contributors that what we’re looking to publish is not opinion, but narrative: stories about what life is like in the world around us. Kevin’s letter is, certainly, opinionated, but it’s also a story – a story about the future.

That’s one reason I’m glad to be publishing Kevin’s letter: he’s a great story-teller. The other is that his letter is an example of a relatively new epistolary form, the chain email. My suspicion is that it’s a medium where a great deal of communication and debate is taking place these days. It’s also a literary form that is closely related to the idea of the open letter; both occupy that elusive middle ground between private and public writing.

When he is not speculating on America’s future, Kevin writes books about its past. He is the author, most recently, ofDreamland, a novel about turn-of-the-century Coney Island.

Our goal is to abandon politics tomorrow and shift our focus to history: the plan is to publish our second archival letter on Friday. Our first, from freed slave Jourdon Anderson to his former master, was written in 1865. Tomorrow’s, from an Ontario housewife to a soldier away at war in France, was written in 1918.

But our plans have changed before. We may find that we have become hooked on election-related open letters. Yesterday we received this encouraging comment on our election coverage from Natalie Robichaud, a French-Canadian reader of Open Letters:

Bravo on the choice of your last two letters! Reading Sarah’s letter was stirring. As a francophone living in Ontario with my heart in Quebec it made me envy Americans their patriotism and pride. I was completely swept away. If only our leaders could inspire us to such great writing. Somehow, I don’t think Jean Chrétien has it in him to do so.

Michael’s letter was surprisingly just as good. His approach to elections is much more down-to-earth and probably reflects what the average American voter feels about the whole process. In any case, it was good to get a glimpse of both sides.

Keep up your wonderful approach to letter writing, I truly enjoy it. Could you please try to find some francophone writers? That way, the rest of the world can benefit from their perspectives as well.

Contrary to Natalie’s pessimism, I feel confident that there are mailbags full of Canadian-election-related open letters out there, waiting to be mailed our way. Please send candidates toeditor@openletters.net. Any francophone readers out there: we especially want to hear from you. Ecrivez!

Yours truly,

Paul Tough