Dear Readers,
Today's letter is by Adam Heimlich, a journalist who has written for a variety of publications (including, notably, the New York Press, former home of Amy Sohn; this is, apparently, New York Press memorial week at Open Letters). Adam is now working for an internet company, which will remain nameless.
Adam's editor at Open Letters, and the person to whom his letter is addressed, is Emily White, who was also his editor at The Stranger, the Seattle weekly of which she was the editor for the second half of the 1990s. Emily is the author of her own open letter, about mania and mothers, and the editor of Samantha Shapiro's magnum-opus letter from the Department of Lost Objects in Jerusalem, which we ran in two parts (this one and this one) back in issue #2.
Samantha's letter was reprinted last week as the cover story in The Stranger, and it's part of a small slew of recent open-letter reprints: Ian Brown's letter, as I mentioned on Tuesday, will be in the next Geist; Cheryl Wagner's interview was in a recent issue of Harper's; and Bill Lychack's letter will soon appear in a new newspaper published by Jack Spade, a men's clothing company.
We're always happy, of course, when our letters find second homes; but of course you don't need to visit the newsstand to read what we publish here in print; you can subscribe to the Open Letters weekly, and have a nice-looking fourteen-page PDF file emailed to you every Sunday, which you can then print out on strong, sturdy white paper and carry around with you wherever you go. You can even do what one Open Letters subscriber in Britain does; as Christian S. of London wrote us yesterday, "I am currently downloading all the issues I missed, so I can have them gloriously bound, with laminated front covers and different colours of card on the back, for an extortionate amount at my local printer place." I don't care how nice that Jack Spade newspaper turns out to be; it's not going to have a laminated front cover.
And speaking of the British, today is a somewhat bittersweet day in the brief history of Open Letters: Craig Taylor is leaving the continent. Craig is the designer and constructor of the Open Letters web site, as well as one of the magazine's contributing editors; he's also the illustrator responsible for those weird UFOs and wizard hats and lightning bolts, and the author of the oft-performed Eminem letter. He's been a great friend to me and to Open Letters since its inception, and has worked tirelessly (and often tiredly, given the time difference between California and Toronto) to make it work, to make it look cool, and to keep it afloat. He's flying to London tonight to attend school there for the next year; he's going to be studying the media or the web or something and, of course, laying the groundwork for the launch of Open Letters U.K.
So thanks to Craig for helping build Open Letters from the ground up, to Adam for today's fine example of what an open letter can be, and to Emily for convincing him to write it to us.
Yours truly,
Paul Tough
