Contemporary Epistolary Forms Day 1

Dear Eva, I have started this letter so many times, but none of the usual beginnings serve me. I do not hope this letter finds you well. In fact, I wonder if I want it to find you at all. I do not have any previous missives to answer to nor do I know if you have any...

Dear Jimbo, I hope the mask-making is still treating you well. It’s been too long since Halifax, Saint Pete’s, Queen Street, your affair, the move, Bar Harbour, Mystic, all that mast climbing and bow jumping, tab dropping and joint rolling, we were so fit, I'm still...

Dear Sarah, You’ve seen my screeds (your word, not mine) before, and picked at how marginal their interest might be to any given reader―and you know well the difficulty of taking a strong position that itself is likely to bear many uncomfortable consequences. I insist...

Dear Not Donald, I’ve been asked to write a short flash fiction in which I attempt to convince you that autofiction is or is not a literary genre. Did your eyes glaze over when you saw the word “fiction” appear twice in that first sentence? I know, I know: you don’t...

Dearest Simone, Whatever happened to science? I don’t remember Biology, but History I recall as if it were yesterday. Our menagerie used to be measurable. We could feed all the animals under Mr. Huemiller’s desk, as long as the text was in cursive. Simone, do you...

I just want to welcome all of you and encourage you to share your writing experiments—and to share your thoughts on the writing of others. Treating each other as interlocutors—-or audiences for these epistolary experiments—- honors our writing. There is no bad...

Some days you sat on the dresser. You could make yourself small as perfume and lipstick tubes. You could touch all the things I couldn’t. I watched you slink through my mother’s jewelry box, grow big as me and drape yourself in rhinestones. You would gather up...

Dearest Luka, It is dark and the branches bent and pointing at me take on a sinister sneer as if to say what is it that you do? I am wind-stooped and bear the ridicule of their whispering fingers. I walk with a look that the feet can’t say, following themselves...

Dear Esther, May I address you as dear? I’ve never met you. Never even seen your picture—I don’t think one exists. But there is an image of you, a striking image, that I carry with me. Remember when people used to carry photos in their wallets? Slide them behind clear...

“I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.” Are these your words, or mine? I have read them so often that I dreamed you into extinction and absconded with your tongue, making it my own. Heavy-lidded one, sleepwalker, I borrowed your coat, the dark...