Milford, Connecticut
January 4, 2001

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Sharon O’Connor, who wrote an open letter last August about her five-year-old daughter, Mazie. In my editor’s letter back then, I told the story of how I first encountered Sharon’s writing five years ago in her zine, Ajax Maple, and how Lisa Carver helped me track her down last spring to contribute something to Open Letters.

Sharon’s first letter remains a favorite of mine, and of many other readers; back in October, when I was soliciting nominees for our rerun week, everyone was all, “Mazie. Mazie. Mazie.” Like Sharon’s first letter, today’s is about being a mother; like all the letters this week, it’s about an ending.

Yesterday brought a three-way international effort on behalf of Open Letters: In London, Craig Taylor was reorganizing our web archives; in Tampa, Michael Welch was setting up an Open Letters discussion page; and in Vancouver, Dean Allen was putting the finishing touches on a redesign of the Open Letters PDF weekly.

First, to London. Thanks to Craig’s labors, readers can now access the Open Letters archives in four different ways. Two of them have been around for a while: the alphabetical archive and the archive by date.

The first new archive is an archive of editor’s letters, arranged chronologically, from first to last; those letters include not just notes on and links to each day’s letter, but also reactions and anecdotes and stories from readers, from Julie Hanify’s tale of redemption at a high-school reunion, inthis editor’s letter; to James Nestor’s memories, in this one, of using his customer-service job to send happiness and absurdity out into the world.

The other new archive organizes our letters by subject. Categories range from the straightforward – Work and Family andLove – to some that are a bit more high-concept, like Memory and Quests andNeighbors.

And in case it’s not clear from these additions: the archives aren’t going anywhere. Although we won’t be adding any new letters after tomorrow, Open Letters will remain in place, right here, in perpetuity.

Yesterday’s second project was undertaken, on his own initiative, by Michael Welch, author of three open letters, including the Al Gore story: Michael set up a conversation on his online bulletin board about Open Letters’s demise, and his own hopes for its future. I told him I’d send readers there, to converse with him and each other: the link is here.

The third burst of labor came from Dean Allen, celebrated Canadian book designer and author of an open letter about attending his mother’s wedding. Dean offered, a few weeks ago, to redesign the Open Letters weekly. He finished yesterday – just in time – and it’s beautiful.

So if you haven’t yet subscribed to the weekly, now would be a good time. True, you will receive only one issue, but it will be a particularly lovely one, easy to print and suitable for laminating, with all of this week’s letters laid out by a professional hand. To subscribe, send a blank email toweekly@openletters.net, or go here for more detailed information on subscribing.

Also: We’re setting up one more mailing list, for readers who have subscribed to neither the weekly magazine nor the daily reminder: the announcement list. If you send a blank email toannounce@openletters.net, we promise to notify you of any future news about Open Letters: if we do indeed morph into another form, you’ll hear about it; if we get ambitious and have public readings, or a Demise Party, you’ll hear about that, too. (And as always, we pledge never to give your email address out to anyone.)

Please note that if you’re a daily or weekly subscriber, you don’t need to subscribe to the announcement list: if there are announcements in the future, they will automatically be sent to everyone on those two lists.

One more thing: I hope I didn’t give the impression in yesterday’s editor’s letterthat the response I’ve been getting from readers this week has been particularly negative, or combative. I just thought those comments from Gary and Joshua and S and Lisa and Andrew were nice and warm and funny.

In fact I’m very grateful not only for their comments, but for the many other emails I’ve been receiving this week: as I always am when I hear from readers of Open Letters, I’ve been impressed by your eloquence and good humor, and inspired by your ideas and support. I’d like to quote from a bunch of this week’s emails, but that would soon get long and self-indulgent; still, here’s one paragraph I liked, which came in late last night from Andrew Wilson, author of the DMV letter:

my day, and the days of many others, will be missing something. but i’m glad in a way. i worried about it getting tired and predictable, and though it hasn’t yet i’m glad it never will. at the same time i wish i could give you a bigass grant to keep it up. but it seems like it’s not just dollar dearth that did it – if you’re not surprised or engaged or feeling it anymore, then right on for having the guts to end it, usa today notwithstanding, and right on for being straight up about it. whether it’s resurrected, mutated, or ended, it ain’t dead. the 106 plus 6 plus 112 will still be there, a record of an experiment gone right.

That’s certainly the way I like to think about it, anyway.

Tomorrow will bring our last open letter, written last summer by X., our anonymous correspondent from Winnipeg. It’s a conclusion, of sorts, to her remarkable series of letters from volume one, which you can read, if you haven’t already, by going here, here, here, here, and here.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough