Hillsborough, North Carolina
December 8, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today our week of medical letters concludes with an exchange of emails between Aliza Pollack and me. Aliza is, of course, the author of the ongoing series of letters about cancer that we’ve been running over the past few months; her two most recent letters appeared onTuesday and Wednesday of this week.

When I was planning this medical week, a few weeks ago, I knew I wanted to include some contributions from Aliza. I had two letters from her to her friend Miriam that I was planning to run, but I knew her condition had just taken a turn, and I was hoping that she could write one more, new letter that would bring readers up to date with her present condition. I asked her to adapt an email she’d written to me about her current situation into something for Open Letters, but she said she couldn’t, that things had become too hard to write about.

Still, I wanted to find a way to reflect in our pages the fact that things had changed, and how. So I looked back through the emails that she and I had exchanged over the last few months, and proposed to her that we publish an edited version of that sporadic email conversation, instead of a final letter. She said she thought that sounded like a good idea. So that’s where today’s exchange came from.

Beginning on Monday, Open Letters will be under the command of a special guest editor: Abby Bridge, formerly the editor of a great zine called Other People’s Mail, a now-dormant publication that, in 1995 and 1996, published found letters, journal entries, and notes left on cars. Abby’s zine has always been an inspiration to Open Letters (it also helped inspire this episode of This American Life, which borrowed the name of Abby’s zine and which features contributions from a number of Open Letters correspondents); and when Abby got in touch with me a few weeks ago, I asked her whether she’d be interested in guest-editing Open Letters for a week, to bring to our readers some of the found mail that she’s been collecting since Other People’s Mail went on its extended hiatus.

So next week, Open Letters becomes a mere vessel for Other People’s Mail, the electronic version. Please come visit.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough