I’M A BIG letter writer.
I write letters to family members, famous people, and fan readers.
I write letters to people who can write back to me, and even to those who can’t. Like fictional and literary characters.
I have also written letters that were not meant to be sent. Like when I was angry, or lovesick, or just trying to write out my thoughts, and work out my confusion and doubt.
*
Not a few of my love letters have become famous.
There’s the letter to Uranus (2003, which was first published in my Pierre Magazine), my Dear Zach letter (2015, which ultimately became part of my play, Welcome to Grindr), and even that Let-me-tell-you-about-love-boy letter last Valentine’s (2020).
*
My trilogy of memoirs — The Essential Thoughts of a Purple Cat (1996), Moon River Butterflies, and Me (1997), and My Life as a Hermit (1998) all contain letters.
In fact, My Life as a Hermit has the subtitle “Nineteen Letters and a Dream”.
If you are interested, all three books have been collected in a new volume called Heart of My Youth, published in the U.S. last August.
*
But because not many people write back to me, I am also a voracious reader of other famous people’s letters.
Remember Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet?
What about Vincent van Gogh’s prodigious correspondence with his brother Theo?
What about the letters of Abelard and Heloise?
What about the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell?
And St. Paul’s letters to the early Christian communities?
*
What I like most about letters are the intimate thoughts of people revealed in their most private correspondences.
I mean, I’m sure most letter writers only meant one other person to read their letters. (Unless they are St. Paul writing to communities!)
And that’s really a wonderful thing for me.
*
To write a letter means you have a particular person-reader in mind.
So all you have to really cater to is this one person.
Unlike writing a book or a newspaper column where you have to tailor your language to be politically correct, to appeal to as many people as possible, to be appropriate for print, to observe the publishing company’s house policies, and all the censorship crap that I do not really agree with.
*
But because almost everybody can write a letter, and I cannot read every letter in the planet, I can only waste my time on certain letters.
And because I have read so many letters in my life, I just instinctively know if I want to finish reading a letter by the end of the first paragraph. Maybe even the first sentence.
*
I want to encourage people to write letters.
But more importantly, I want writers to write letters to young people.
Letters that young people would like to read because they are letters that affect them emotionally, intellectually, psychically, maybe spiritually, like I affect my fans and readers.
With 28 books under my belt, I think I’m a pretty good judge of what readers like.
*
So, yeah. I want people to write letters.
And I want to collect and publish these letters.
But first, the letters have to affect me.
The letters have to impress me.
Therefore, I feel it is my responsibility to tell wannabe writers what I expect from their submissions.
*
The basics: I want letters that are only 300 to 500 words long.
If you want to go beyond 500, that’s fine for as long as the letter will not bore me to death.
I mean, that’s fine for as long as the letter encourages me to read on.
Go beyond 500 words if the letter wants to go in that direction.
In the end, f*ck my PSN rules.
Go serve literature.
*
If the letter is meant to be 549 words, then let it be.
Just be aware that I am your first reader.
And your gateway to publishing.
If your beautiful 501-word letter fails to impress me, I have more reasons to turn you down.
And I can assure sure you that word count is one of them.
Because however liberal I am, I really like playing god sometimes.
*
(To be continued as “Letters that move me”)/PN
