Milford, Connecticut
January 5, 2001

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from X., our anonymous correspondent in Winnipeg. It’s the sixth and final chapter in her series of letters to her former boyfriend Mike, about their thirteen-year-old son. (You can read the first five episodes here,here, here, here, and here.)

X. became somewhat less anonymous to Open Letters readers back in October, when she was revealed in this editor’s letter to be Miriam Toews, a novelist and journalist and mom. If you click on the link in the previous sentence, you can read all about Miriam, and why she stopped being X. in our pages, and decided to become Miriam.

Though the X. letters ended in August, there was this one last entry, a postscript of sorts, that Miriam wrote in September. And when I decided that things were going to shut down here at Open Letters, I asked Miriam if I could use it as our final letter, and she said yes. I admit it doesn’t have all that much to do with this week‘s theme – endings and beginnings – but it is about a dream come true, and so somehow it feels like it fits.

As I explained in yesterday’s editor’s letter, and Wednesday’s, I’m not sure what, if anything, will come next for Open Letters. The archives will remain right here; the back issues will always be available for download. But whether the magazine will exist solely as an archive or transform itself into something different: that remains to be seen. If you’d like us to keep you posted on our future plans, you can sign up for our new announcement list, by sending a blank email to announce@openletters.net. We’ll notify that list if there’s any news about Open Letters: if we do indeed morph into another incarnation, you’ll hear about it; if we get ambitious and decide to hold a public event, you’ll hear about that, too. (And as always, we pledge never to give your email address out to anyone.) Weekly and daily subscribers: you don’t need to sign up for this new list; if there are bulletins in the future, they’ll go to daily and weekly subscribers automatically.

I’ve been more talkative than usual in my editor’s letters this week, which leaves me somewhat at a loss for words today about the end of Open Letters in its current incarnation. I do want to say this, though: the one thing that felt weird about this week’s editor’s letters was that there was a lot of “I” going on, and not a lot of “we.” I think that’s because the decision to shut down Open Letters was mine alone, and so I felt that I was the one who needed to explain things.

But Open Letters has from its inception been a true collaboration, like nothing else I’ve ever worked on. It involved dozens of people in three countries, some of whom I’ve never met, all working either for free or for cheap, giving deeply of themselves simply because they cared about what we were doing. The magazine would never have existed without them.

Ian Brown dreamed up many of the original ideas behind Open Letters, and helped make those ideas a reality. Craig Taylor created the web site’s design and its architecture. Susan Burton invented new distribution networks for the magazine, and worked behind the scenes on its design, technical underpinnings, and editorial direction. Stacy Abramson, Abby Bridge, Ian Brown, Deirdre Dolan, Jonathan Goldstein, Joel Lovell, Sam Sifton, Cheryl Wagner, and Emily White worked as editors, bringing in countless new writers and ideas; their work, especially, gave the magazine its breadth and its depth. And Nicole Avril, Jack Hitt, John Hodgman, Kevin Kelly, Todd Lappin, Elizabeth Meister, Scott Ritcher, Steve Sherrill, Miriam Toews, Sarah Varney, and Ethan Watters offered much-needed advice and support along the way.

Just to say that I’m grateful to them, though, feels wrong, because that sounds like I’m saying that this was my project and they pitched in, and that’s not at all what it felt like. What Open Letters felt like was something that evolved on its own, a living thing, created not only by its editors and writers, but by its readers as well.

So that’s what I’m grateful for: for the chance to have been a part of it. Like playing basketball at Venice Beach, it feels like a dream come true.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough