October 17, 2022 Letters Love, Loosha By Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie All photographs courtesy of Chip Livingston. In 1994, the internationally acclaimed fiction writer Lucia Berlin met the New York School poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, where they were both visiting writers. “We just clicked,” Berlin said in a 2002 interview. “We cut through right away into each other’s deep feelings. It was like falling in love, or going back to your childhood best friend in first grade, that kind of really pure friendship.” That friendship developed through a faithful and frequent correspondence, a literary exchange of about two letters per week over the course of a decade. Lucia was living in Boulder, Colorado, and later in Los Angeles; Kenward was dividing his time between New York City and Calais, Vermont. Despite the distance between them, the two writers came to depend on their intimate friendship and deeply valued their correspondence. In the following letters dated between May 28 and August 5, 2000, Lucia and Kenward discuss a New York production of Kenward’s musical play, Postcards on Parade, and the books each was working on at the time: Lucia’s memoir, Welcome Home, and Kenward’s fourteenth poetry collection, Blast from the Past, which he wanted to dedicate to Lucia. They write about the books they’re reading, Lucia’s recent move to a trailer park, and the thrilling poetic visuals she sees from her windows. —Chip Livingston Read More
September 14, 2022 Letters The Pleasure of a Petty Thief: Letters, 1982–83 By Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya Hans Georg Berger, Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, 1984. Courtesy of Semiotext(e). In 1977, the writers Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya began exchanging letters. Though the two rarely met, Guibert became increasingly obsessed with Savitzkaya as they continued writing to each other over the course of a decade. This selection of their messages is the first in our new series featuring correspondence, Letters. Paris March 11, 1982 Eugène a belgian stamp sticks out of my mailbox, what if it’s a letter from Eugène, and anyone could have taken it, between the moment when the mailman delivered it and the moment I return home, cluttered with files and folders and newspapers and a flan that will be delicious but yes it is a letter from Eugène, and it, it risks not being delicious, I ready myself for anything: a letter full of insults, or even worse, a letter that mocks me (yesterday on the telephone I heard the voice of a girl who asked me for a photo of Eugène and I clearly sensed in her sugary and whispering tone a caricature of my affection, my own expectation), first off, the letter is quite thin, and maybe there’s nothing at all inside the envelope, and if someone has stolen the letter that will cause yet another misunderstanding, but delicious your letter is still closed, and that’s why I wait to open it, I even crack open the flan first, and start this beginning of a reply, in case some polite or distant words end up cutting my desire to write you off at the knees, do you realize what’s happening right now, on my end? I’m missing an interlocutor, and I’ve chosen you, perhaps wrongly, to be one … Enough, I open the letter, shielding my eyes. But no, look, your letter is sweet, so sweet, even if the warnings about your twisted character would like to make me question what you say. I’d love to see you in April when you come, and to take you to Bernard Faucon’s, I told him about you and he’s expecting us, I hope it will be a fun evening. Don’t feel at all obliged to respond to this letter, I am a bit more confident now, and I’ll wait for you to give a sign that alerts me of your arrival. Je t’embrasse: hervé Read More