Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at pw.org, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
Letters
Feedback from readers
Books sometimes speak to each other in a kind of question-and-answer. My 1980s transnational quest novel, Go Home (Knut House, 2016), reclaims the xenophobic taunt and repurposes it. The opening paragraph of Go Home poses the relevant question for my Parsi Indian American protagonist Viraf: “But where, exactly, was that?” Reading of poet Solmaz Sharif’s quest for home in “Naming the Nowhere That Language Was Stuck In” (March/April 2022) by Douglas Kearney, I could relate to her disconcerting discovery that her grandmother’s and father’s house in Iran was no longer hers and there was no “actual place where [she] would feel more at home.” Viraf learns the same when he returns to his Parsi family’s flat in Bombay/Mumbai. And for him, like me, a descendant of Zoroastrian refugees, Iran is a thousand years even further back in his ancestral past. I agree with Sharif’s epiphany that “belonging and connectedness is actually transient and illusory and not tied to material or concrete circumstances.” Yet Viraf has his own epiphany at the colorful World of Nations festival: “In the midst of it all, he felt more at home than anywhere else. A new term was catching on: the global village. Here was a larger allegiance that felt natural: not to manmade divisions, but to the world.” More and more of us in this migrant era feel like global citizens. Sharif seems to tap into this feeling or something like it, something even larger or deeper, when she indicates the universality of her poems’ speaker in Customs: “She is the person who’s made of all people somehow.” Thanks for a great article and your consistently excellent magazine.
Sohrab Homi Fracis
Jacksonville, Florida
As a many-times-failed novelist who finally wound up with a successful trilogy—I’m happy with it, anyway—I want to thank Steve Almond for his candor and sound advice in “Confessions of a Failed Novelist: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Try, Try, and Try Again” (March/April 2022). Among the mistakes I made over the past thirty years were these: trying to write the Great American Novel by fancying myself another Philip Roth or John Updike—never gonna happen; aiming for literary perfection—the eternal enemy of the good; and imagining that deep philosophical themes alone can propel a novel forward—nope, you really do need characters that intrigue you as well as what Almond rightly calls “sustaining forward momentum.” I have also learned that, for me, the title of an incipient novel is a great way to generate both the characters and the architecture of the work. Once I had the title for the first part of my trilogy, the novel crystallized for me almost magically.
Ronald W. Pies
Lexington, Massachusetts
Michael Bourne’s “Still So Much to Say: Honoring a Loved One’s Literary Legacy” (January/February 2022) captures the bittersweet journey of attempting to posthumously publish a loved one’s work. His article encapsulates the varied emotions my daughter Carrie and I have experienced as we move through the process of bringing the work of Rin Kelly, her sister and my daughter, to the world. Although he writes, “There are few guidelines to honoring a loved one’s legacy,” Bourne’s piece has served as a blueprint for us, advising and inspiring us to confront the various facets of the publishing experience, some of which we had not considered—royalties, republication, and commercial versus indie presses. Like Bourne, we questioned the possibility of editors and publishers not wanting to work with a deceased author—that’s a hurtful word for me to use—but have found he is correct in his assertion that it is the quality of the work editors seek. Rin’s stories have been accepted by academic presses, with professors sending thoughtful comments on Rin’s work, and general-audience publications that know what will appeal to their readers. We’ve now published eight stories and are seeking a publisher for an anthology. We have an editor, Josh Wilson, working on Rin’s novel “The Bright and Holo Sky,” and he adheres to Bourne’s theory of “subtracting but not adding” to the text. Bourne shares the emotional side of this tricky endeavor. When I read the stories I found in my daughter’s laptop, it is as if Rin were here with me, sharing her pain, her aching concern for social injustice, her voice. Michael Bourne knows of what I speak.
Judith Reese
Nathrop, Colorado
I am writing to show my appreciation for an article that truly touched and inspired me. Over the last couple years, like most people, I have experienced some difficult times, yet there was something about this article that spurred me to keep working through it. I’m drawn to “Still So Much to Say: Honoring a Loved One’s Literary Legacy” by Michael Bourne, who inherited his mother’s fiction pieces when she died and now has to decide if he wants to publish them or do something else. In a strange way, I’m going through that with my own mother, who died in 2020. She, like so many others, had a story to tell, but never told a soul. In order to get the story, one would have to observe. I observed her, and now I am trying to tell at least part of her story through my own work. It is odd to “expose” her to the world, as these are sensitive topics and conditions, and yet doing this work also makes me even more proud to be her son, as I look back and realize how strong she truly was to fight for so long. I felt that way when we displayed some of her artwork during her wake and funeral. These were pieces that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades, if ever, and seeing the awestruck faces of family and friends when they looked upon her talent, again, it made me glad that we showed the world a little bit of my mom. Bourne’s piece is beautiful, and it is a reflection of my own journey through the process of grieving and amazement—a journey I did not intend to take, but I am encouraged to see where it leads me.
Al Dickenson
Milwaukee, Wisconson