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

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

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Scott, a semi-anonymous CEO of a struggling dot-com. I say “semi” because Scott is his real first name. His letter is episode three in our week of open letters about endings and beginnings.

Scott first wrote me back in October, with what I thought was a pretty interesting suggestion. Here’s what his email said:

i have a letter i am about to write to the staff of my five person start up, on the verge of its collapse. we were all extremely good friends going into the experience, and it is a very sad experience to watch it fail, during this time of terrible tech market action, and because of my own inexperience as a ceo. i was wondering if such a thing would be of interest to you. i have found it very easy to be cynical about the “dot com” craze, but we were a small, tireless group who probably deserved better. at any rate, it would qualify as extremely personal, but i would share it with your readers if only to illuminate the very human side of the collapse of the tech markets and the hopes of ppl who thought they could pull off something exciting and unique in the midst of a sea of mediocrity.

I wrote him back and said I liked the idea of publishing his valedictory letter. Then, o cursed fate, a little money came through to keep his company afloat, so we put off the letter, and kept in touch. A month or so went by, and I began to wonder whether a letter by Scott to someone outside the company, from the midst of his struggle, might be more interesting than his final address to the troops. I asked him what he thought of that idea, and he sent metoday’s letter.

I haven’t heard from Scott in a couple of weeks, so I don’t know what’s been going on with his company since he wrote. Today’s letter represents the state of things in mid-December – but maybe fortune smiled on Scott’s company at the end of Q4, and things are rosy again. I hope so.

On to Open Letters business: My explanation in yesterday’s editor’s letter that Open Letters was closing because it was on the verge of becoming unsurprising didn’t play too well, I’m afraid. Joshua Dumas, a weekly subscriber, wrote, “i got to tell you, i’m not feeling you on this one; every week i am surprised: by great friggin writing, by quiet style, by friggin amazing letters and some kinda right on insight and its spilling out the printer at work on Monday morning.” Another reader, Gary Evans, wrote, “It’s called Open Letters, not Your Daily Freakin’ Surprise.”

The PayPal thing, too: that didn’t always go over so well: One reader, named S Smith, wrote, “Your pitch was a little like the old National Lampoon magazine cover: Buy this magazine or we shoot this dog.” Even worse, I think it felt to many readers more like: Hey, I just shot your dog – want to buy a magazine?

Lisa Miya-Jervis, editor of Bitchmagazine, summed up the feelings of many readers when she wrote, yesterday, “I am curious about your request for donations – why not ask for support to continue, rather than to retroactively pay people who I would bet were not expecting money from this writing at all? I would happily fork over some cash to help OL continue, but it feels futile to do so otherwise.”

Here’s my answer: From day one, the main financial model that we’ve had in our heads was at some point to ask subscribers and regular readers to donate money to cover our costs. The public-radio model, basically. I still believe that that’s the best way to fund a magazine like Open Letters, and the chorus of opinion I heard yesterday from readers made it clear that that’s a model that makes sense to a lot of you, as well.

But all along, I felt strongly that I didn’t want to ask for subscription fees without being sure that I could deliver a subscription. If I asked readers for, say, twenty dollars for the next year of Open Letters, and then had to call it quits after three months, you’d feel ripped off. (Please see today’s letterfor a glimpse at how that would make me feel.)

It’s still one option, and probably the best one, for the future: to become secure enough, financially and editorially, to be able to guarantee publication, and then request subscription funds from readers.

But yesterday’s PayPal button wasn’t about that. My model there wasn’t the public-radio pledge drive – it was the way the bartender at the Continental Club in Austin passes the ten-gallon cowboy hat around after the Hot Club of Cowtown plays happy hour: if you like what you just heard, you can give a couple of dollars to the artists.

I’m well aware that the writers didn’t write their letters in the hope of financial return (as a reader named Andrew Knight wrote yesterday, “I imagine that having your letter published in Open Letters is like having one published in Penthouse Forum: it’s a matter of honor, not income”), but I still feel that the work our correspondents have contributed to Open Letters is valuable, and not just in a metaphorical sense: they deserve to be paid well for writing so well. So that’s why I decided that whatever money we collect this week will be divided equally among the writers, rather than be put toward any potential future editorial costs. It seemed like a warm exchange, like dropping change in a troubador’s open guitar case: a nice way to say thanks to those whose words are the bricks and mortar of Open Letters.

The writers and I are very grateful for all of the generous – often very generous – contributions we received yesterday, but we’re just as grateful for the kind notes and quiet attention that the letters themselves have provoked. You’re still welcome to donate, if you’re able to negotiate the tortuous shores of PayPal – all the information is inyesterday’s editor’s letter – but please don’t feel compelled to donate, or guilt-tripped, or anything.

One final clarification, in the service of which I need to quote Andrew Knight again:

What’s with this beating around the bush thing you’ve been doing: Open Letters is dead, it’s over, it’s gone, no more open letters ever…perhaps. You would make a horrible doctor: “Yes, he’s dead, maybe.” Or a cop: “Yes, he definitely is the man who shot and killed my partner no more than 3 feet in front of me…I think.” Tell it to us straight, man.

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew: I’m being as straight as I can. I have no secret plan. All I know is that I need to shut things down on Sunday (after the newly designed weekly goes out to our subscribers). Then I will think about things. I love open letters, and Open Letters, and I would be very happy if I, or we, or you, were able to come up with a way for it to return, or to morph into something new and improved. But I can’t be certain that will happen, which is why I’m calling this an end, rather than a hiatus.

Since day one, I’ve tried in these editor’s letters to inform you readers as much as possible about the complicated reality that is the creation of this magazine. Like the packing of sausage, it hasn’t always been pretty, and it hasn’t always been straightforward. So I’m not trying to be cute when I say that I’m not sure what the future will bring; I’m just telling the truth. And Andrew’s right: I would make a horrible doctor.

Tomorrow, the return of Sharon O’Connor, author of the wise and beautiful Mazie letter. More great friggin writing from Your Daily Freakin’ Surprise.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Brian Dunn, in Brooklyn. It’s about an accident, but more than that, too: it’s about escape, and starting over, and staying put for too long. It’s part of our special weekof open letters on endings and beginnings, and like many of this week’s letters, Brian’s is about both.

Brian has worked for the phone company for the past twelve years. I like the idea that he is part of the long tradition of clerk-authors – insurance-clerk Franz Kafka, post-office-clerk Charles Bukowski, hospital-file-clerk Harvey Pekar. But I’m not sure if my literary fantasy is entirely accurate where Brian is concerned: I sent him an email asking him to describe his job, and he wrote back to say that he sets up “trunks” and “T-1 lines,” and then it got complicated. So for all I know, he’s the CEO of Verizon.

I announced in yesterday’s editor’s letter that this is the last week of Open Letters, in its current incarnation at least. But I didn’t offer much in the way of a coherent explanation for the news – which is perhaps why a reader named Victoria Golden wrote yesterday to say,

This feels like a great love affair that ends with a Sunday morning phone call. “Hello, darling. You are the most wonderful person in the world to me and because it’s going so well, because we are everything to each other that either of us could ever want, I think we should see other people for a while.”

Which I thought was a pretty nice way to look at it, and probably better than any explanation I’ll be able to come up with. But still, I said yesterday that I’d try, so I’ll try. And as I usually do when trying to explain things, I’ll start off by quoting from some letters: On Sunday morning, I got this email from Rick Moody, author of the birdfeeder letter:

Heard a rumor you were closing down the operation at OPEN LETTERS. I’m guessing this is premature, but if not, I’m curious about your burdens.

I wrote back to say,

No, it’s true. Next week is our last, for this incarnation, anyway. Perhaps we’ll find a way to continue, or revive, but I’ve decided to call it a conclusion, rather than a hiatus.

My burdens: that’s a tough question. There are financial ones, of course; those have been around since day one, but they’re coming to a head now. But there are some editorial ones, as well: I don’t think I’m thinking as adventurously as I was a few months ago.

Mostly, though, it’s money. We’ve managed to run things on the cheap so far, but I think we just hit the limits of cheapness.

I’m hopeful that with some time off, I’ll be able to come up with a way to revive the magazine in a way that would be self-supporting. But I don’t know yet what that would be.

And then sometimes I think it’s best to just think of it as a six-month interactive performance-art project. Like encasing myself in a block of ice, but warmer.

To which Rick replied,

I used to feel very close to the perception of John “Rotten” Lydon, back when Public Image Limited was a going concern: “Our cause will be lost, but that won’t be so bad, will it?” I used to think that this was the correct model, the Young Marble Giants model. Make a brilliant record, call it quits.

Now I really admire the survival model. DeLillo, publishing one book after another, no matter what you think about it. There’s another title coming along soon enough, like the ephemeral New England weather. It’s grueling and frequently painful, this approach, but things really start to get interesting over the course of years and years. People develop, they individuate, then the real issues in a creative endeavor begin to surface, the idiosyncrasies.

So this is to argue for thinking more about what you’re doing on your hiatus and perhaps soldiering on. The money issue, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

Ah, the money issue.

None of us who work on Open Letters entered into the project hoping to get rich. We did, however, have some hopes of not getting too poor. Some of those hopes were based on the pie-in-the-sky Internet economics of the spring of 2000, in which it seemed that money would follow good content – or lousy content, for that matter – wherever it wanted to go. Some of them were based on Tibor Kalman‘sbelief that there are “a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future.” And, really, it just seemed like a worthwhile and exciting thing to do, even if its destiny was to be short-lived.

But here’s the thing: I think one of the highest (and most fun) responsibilities of an editor is to keep surprising his or her readers, to keep things from getting too stable, to keep readers from knowing what to expect when they turn the page (or click the link). And beginning a couple of months ago, I began to feel that I was running out of surprises, and worse, that the only surprises I could think of would cost money that we didn’t have. The money part is a horrible admission for me to have to make – I mean, Nirvana recorded Bleach for $606.15; the cheapest ideas are always the best ones; Emily White wrote me to say “I think the energy you need to continue OL is probably a punk rock energy,” and I knew she was right – but for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling that without a sizable budget, I was going to hit the wall.

Oh, where’s a drawing of the universe when you need one?

Here’s why this letter isn’t that much fun to write: because a lot of other people have given a great deal to Open Letters: their stories; writing they could have sold for more money elsewhere; time; sleep; attention; enthusiasm. It’s to even those scales somewhat that I’m turning to you now, cap in hand, like the younger brother of the neo-breakdancing teenagers in the Times Square subway station, and asking you for some of your money.

Ian Brown once wrote that “OL’s entire business plan consists of four words scrawled on a styrofoam take-out lid dotted with traces of Bi Bim Bop,” and that’s mostly true; but those words always included “maybe” and “they’ll” and “pay.” For complicated reasons, which a non-disclosure agreement I signed a few months ago with a big corporation prevents me from going into (no, seriously), we never managed to figure out a technology graceful enough to allow us to ask readers, inobtrusively, for regular contributions.

So instead we’re doing it all at once, for one week only, using a less-than-ideal technology called PayPal.

Here’s the deal: When you click on the button below, you’ll be transported to a page where, if all goes well, you can send Open Letters some money: any amount over a dollar, charged to a Visa or Mastercard. Each and every dollar we receive will be distributed to our 72 authors, on a per-letter basis; none will go to overhead, none will go to our editors, none will go to creditors, none will go to stamps. (PayPal will take a small cut, but that can’t be helped.) This won’t be tax-deductible or anything; but we’ll consider it a charitable donation nonetheless: in the spirit of Tibor Kalman’s lunatic entrepreneurs, but on a smaller scale.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with PayPal – someday someone will come up with a better technology for this – but they do seem to be reliable, security-wise. If you give them your credit-card number, they won’t do anything weird with it. (They also don’t give the numbers to us; they just tell us that you donated.)

A few tips on negotiating the next couple of screens, if you do choose to make a donation:

1. Leave “Quantity” set at 1; fill in whatever donation you want to make under “Item Price.”

2. They only take Visa and Mastercard.

3. When they ask for your “card verification number,” they mean the three-digit number at the end of your card number, on the back, in the white strip with your signature.

4. When you get to “shipping information,” click the button that says nothing needs to be shipped.

5. You have various options for bailing out along the way if anything seems fishy.

To take a ride on this crazy roller coaster, click here (and please come back when you’re done):

Thank you for your support. And if you found the above explanation lacking, well, I’ve got three more editor’s letters to try to get it right.

A few more notes:

1. If you’re just returning to Open Letters today after a couple of weeks away, be sure to check out last week’s letters; they were so good.

2. As if this editor’s letter isn’t enough to read: we have a brand-new, jumbo-sized links page to distract you: books to buy; work by our contributors elsewhere on the Internet to read; Open Letters press to examine; clowns, balloons, talking dogs.

3. Comments, suggestions, rich uncles? Send us a note, ateditor@openletters.net.

Tomorrow, Endings Week continues, with a letter from a novice dot-com CEO, on the imminent death of his start-up. In case you thought we had problems.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from B., an Open Letters reader in Brooklyn, New York. She has chosen to remain anonymous.

B.’s letter rings in this auspicious and suspicious new year and kicks off a special week of open letters about beginnings and endings (but mostly about endings). It may not turn out to be the cheeriest week of letters we’ve ever published, what with all the death and divorce and bankruptcy, but it’ll certainly be one of the more dramatic. Plus, a bonus: it will conclude, on Thursday and Friday, with new letters from two of our most-clamored-for correspondents: Sharon O’Connor, in Cabot, Vermont, and Winnipeg’s mysteriousX., both of whom have maintained a Salingeresque silence in these pages since August, when their last letters appeared.

Also, some news: We’ve chosen this week’s theme with more than just the end of a year in mind: This will be the final week of Open Letters, in its current incarnation at least. On Sunday, our final weekly issue (with a cool new west-coast design, we hope) will go out tosubscribers, and the web site will transform itself into an archive of the 106 daily letters, 6 conversations, 112 editor’s letters, and 24 weekly issues that we’ve published.

But, wait: why are we quitting, at the very moment that we finally got written up in USA Today? I’ll try to answer that question this week, in my four remaining editor’s letters, and I’ll also lay down a few thoughts, from me and from some of our readers, on where this project might go next.

Happy new year, and please stay tuned. If you were away last week, holiday-making, don’t forget to read last week’s letters- they are five golden rings. Tomorrow: death, and an airport limo, pay a visit.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Jonathan Ames of Brooklyn, New York, and Bloomington, Indiana. He’s the author of two novels, I Pass Like Night and The Extra Man, and a memoir, What’s Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer.

I have been a fan of Jonathan’s non-fiction writing for many years – I used to read it serially in his New York Press column, which in the mid-Nineties alternated with and complemented Amy Sohn’s column. (Do you remember her open letter, on long-distance love? Well, you can read it here.)

His column, and his book, and now his open letter, are all marked by an unusual and enviable confidence in his right and his duty to tell his own story.

Speaking of which, this week we received an email from a reader named Jon Calame, who said he’d recently been reading the first chapter of “Walden,” by Henry David Thoreau, and had come across a passage that reminded him of Open Letters. “I thought I would pass it along for a rainy day,” he wrote, “or a small boost when the editing seems hopeless.”

Editing, of course, never seems hopeless, but that doesn’t take away from Jon’s generosity, or diminish the truth of Thoreau’s words, which seem like a fitting introduction, or postscript, to Jonathan’s letter:

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained….We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

Monday is New Year’s Day, it’s true. But we’ll be publishing all the same, ringing in the new year and ringing out volume three of Open Letters with a week’s worth of letters about beginnings and endings.

And some time early on New Year’s Eve, our subscribers will receive their last PDF issue of 2000. If you’d like to join them, you can read all about our free subscriptions right here.

Happy holidays.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Heather O’Neill in Montreal. It’s about an unexpected visit from her mother, which gives it a certain bookend quality: her last letter, which we published in October, was about a trip to an amusement park with her father.

Heather and Aliza Pollack are the only Open Letters correspondents who’ve contributed a letter to each of our three volumes; Heather’s first letter, which appeared in July, was about teaching poetry to sixth graders, and it was another rare gem.

For additional O’Neill biography, please consult Jonathan Goldstein’s editor’s letter about her first letter, which includes a scene of Heather throwing a Glad bag of her mother’s possessions out the window, a nice bit of foreshadowing.

We’re still on our holiday schedule this week; we’ll most likely leave this letter in place until Friday. Our regular daily schedule resumes on Monday, when the final week of volume three begins: a special collection of letters about endings.

Happy holidays.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Stephen Osborne in Vancouver, who in addition to being an abnormally talented writer, is also the editor of Geist magazine, the Canadian magazine of arts and culture. If you go and visit Geist’s web site today, you’ll find on the front page yet more engrossing writing by Stephen, this time with a Christmas flavor, or at least a theft-of-Christmas flavor.

Speaking of fine writing by Open Letters contributors elsewhere on the web, I neglected to mention, in my editor’s letter about Paul Maliszewski’s letter on suing his ex-landlord, that “I, Faker,” Paul’s confessional magnum opus, is now available, in its entirety, on the web. In the article, which appeared in the Baffler, Paul describes an extended satirical project that he embarked upon while working at The Business Journal of Central New York a while back: he created a dozen or so fake (and often quite deranged) identities, and contributed letters to the editor, guest columns, and eventually made-up feature articles under their names.

“As Paul Maliszewski,” he explains, “I continued to report on quarterly figures and tepidly gauge the effects of proposed regulations. My fake characters, however, were free to engage business issues with everything from unhinged speculation to dimwitted appeals to common sense.”

I’ve been hearing people talk about “I, Faker” for a while, but somehow I’d failed to read it until yesterday. It’s a great pleasure; I recommend it. If you gohere, you can read the whole thing; if you go here, you can browse through the “I, Faker” archives, which include all of the letters that Paul’s alter egos sent to his paper, as well as this really entertaining fake article about an entirely invented Watertown, New York, company.

Two other things about today’s letter: (1) Stephen Osborne is also the author of an open letter on scooter accidents, which we published in September; and (2) his new letter shares a thematic, if not a chronological, kinship with the week of medical letters that we ran a couple of weeks ago, and especially with Kevin Patterson’s letter from Saipan, which addresses diabetes and its treatment from the doctor’s perspective; and Cheryl Wagner’s interview with Matt Salada, rock ‘n roll diabetic.

Our laid-back holiday schedule continues – this week and next we’re publishing only every other day or so. The next weekly will go out to subscribers on December 31; we’ll resume our regular daily schedule on January 1, 2001; that week will mark the end of volume III of Open Letters.

Happy holidays.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it difficult to read Paul Maliszewski’sletter today, about his lawsuit against his former landlord, and not think about another recent legal proceeding: the matter of Gore v. Bush. When Paul writes that he and his girlfriend, Monique, “invested in the law a great deal of our most abstract hopes about the eventual and satisfying triumph of right, reason, justice, and fairness over wrong, illogic, injustice, and iniquity,” one can’t help but recall certain abstract hopes that many of us invested in the U.S. Supreme Court a week or two ago – an investment, as it turned out, with uncommonly lousy returns.

“We had traveled to the law to seek a decision that would hopefully right the wrong that had happened over in our world,” Paul writes. “What we received, in fact, was a decision limited strictly to the narrow world of the law” – which is, I suppose, more than one can say about the majority decision in Gore v. Bush. Paul and Monique, in the end, got off easy.

Paul is the author of three previous open letters that have chronicled, one by one, his and Monique’s journey from Syracuse, New York, to Durham, North Carolina. In the first, they sold all of their possessions. In the second, they drove a twenty-four-foot moving truck several hundred miles. In the third, they were allegedly screwed over by their landlord, and went looking for a new place to live.

We managed to convince Paul to let us make available to the public his “awe-inspiring” legal brief. Just like on msnbc.com, with the Supreme Court documents, you can download Paul’s brief, via PDF, to your computer: Just clickhere.

Also: Today is the six-month anniversary of our first day of publication: On June 19, we published Chana Shvonne Williford’s open letter about falling in love. Happy half-birthday.

For the holidays, we’re easing up on our hectic publishing schedule a little, and so we’ll leave Paul’s trial letter up for until Thursday, or maybe Friday.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough

Dear Readers,

First of all, how about that Abby Bridge? I thought her week of Open Letters/Other People’s Mail was tremendous, and it was certainly well-received: Michael Welch might have put it most succinctly when he wrote on Monday to say,

that tiger woods letter is tight. very tight. intense shit. i’m glad you’re doing this thing this week; experimentation is good. collaboration. right on.

I liked everything that Abby selected, but I’d like to heap special praise on James Nestor’s true confession of being a customer-service fifth columnist, which makes me laugh every time I read it. It was tucked away in Abby’s editor’s letterfrom Wednesday, so you might have missed it. If you haven’t read it, please do.

The week prior to Other People’s Mail week, we published letters about sickness and health, including three dispatches from Aliza Pollack about her current life, with cancer. The final exchange in that trio, between me and Aliza, prompted this suggestion from Jodi Kantor, who is an editor at Slate:

I’m pretty down about Aliza’s relapse. And now I’m feeling an inverted sense of the guilt that she described today about publishing her chemo stories just as she was getting better. Here I’d been celebrating her remission just as she was facing a stem cell transplant! Anyway, when you send encouragement and compliments and luck to her, please add some from me.

Her letter also reminded me that I’ve long wanted to register myself as a stem cell donor. You might find it too cheesy to link her letter to the National Marrow Donation Program’s website – sort of has that “what YOU can do!” ring – but just so you know, the url iswww.marrow.org, and from what I know, they really do need donors.

Jodi’s idea is of course not cheesy in the least.

Today’s letter comes from Angelica Biddle, a young woman in Los Angeles. It’s a love letter, of sorts, to her boyfriend that she cc’d to Open Letters, which was nice of her.

We’re moving to a holiday schedule over the next two weeks, and we’ll be publishing more infrequently than usual: probably five or six letters between now and the end of the year. Tomorrow, Paul Maliszewski concludes his quartet of moving letters (the last one appeared in November) with an epic account of his legal battle with his landlord. It is not to be missed.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough