Recently, Samantha Smith, a middle school student from our town, placed as a Washington State champion in The Library of Congress’ national contest Letters About Literature. Each year, students are asked to write a letter to their favorite authors, living or dead. The winning essays from each state are sent to Washington DC and national winners are announced by the Library of Congress in May. You can read my state’s 2012 winners here and the national winners from previous years are also online.

As an author, you bet I like this contest, which encourages students to think about what they’ve read and how it affects them, but takes it a step further, also suggesting authors enjoy learning how their work has made a difference. Hearing this directly from readers rather than through the filters of reviewers and publishing critics does mean a lot.

After you’ve read a few of the students’ letters, think about an author you would write to. What is at the heart of your wanting to connect with this writer? Did something in their work change your way of being? Give you permission to be more of who you are? Impact those you love or live with? Make you laugh at a time in your life when the ability to laugh was especially important? Did their writing encourage yours? Jot down anecdotes you’d like to tell the author you would like to write to, anecdotes you believe the author would understand and enjoy because they show the effect of their work on others.

Samantha Smith, The Washington State winner from my town, began her letter this way:

Dear Julie Anne Peters,

Every teenager goes through phases; phases with our style and our preferences in general. Sometimes we even start to question our orientation. Maybe we’ll notice that the girl across from us is hot, even though we, too, are girls. That’s what happened to me. I was no longer looking at a girl and thinking, ‘Oh, I like her top.’ I was looking at her and wondering about going on a date with her, even though I still liked boys. I didn’t go shout it from the mountaintops, but I did look for a good book to hide myself in. While scouring the library I fell upon your book: Keeping You a Secret.

She ends her letter confirming her belief that finding the right books helps one solve problems and live authentically: 

After I finished Keeping You a Secret, I made an effort to find other books like it. I read more of your books, such as Far from Xanadu, Luna, and Define “Normal,” as well as books written by others with similar content, for example, Empress of the World by Sarah Ryan. I love how these books make me feel like I have friends in familiar situations. Even though they’re just book characters, they seem real. Sometimes their fictional actions give me the confidence that I didn’t have, to do things that I otherwise never would have done. Like the confidence to turn this letter in to my teacher.

Your Literary Believer,
Sam Smith

Your Turn

1. What author among us would not love to receive a letter from one of our readers letting us know our work has made a difference? Write one now. Be specific about why you are writing and what you want the author to know about the impact of their writing on your life. Don’t sum things up. Take your time and really “talk” to the writer about your life and how their work and articulation of life events helps you.

2. Not let’s turn things around. Write another letter, this one from a reader of your work, whether that work is published, unpublished, or so far just a dream. Who you choose to write this letter is important–it needs to be someone for whom this book matters. You can even write to yourself imagining a younger self who could benefit from what you now know or an older self who you want to remember what you know. It can be written from a descendent you’ll never meet or from an ancestor you knew or never knew. It could be written from a random person who finds your work–on a computer flash drive you left somewhere or in a journal left behind. Be creative! Writing this letter will affirm the importance of writing.

3. One more idea. Tomorrow I am visiting 8th grade classrooms to talk about their community teen read, Blank Confession by Pete Hautman. The story is a retelling of Shane, in which a stranger comes to town, has a positive impact on the people of that town, and leaves as mysteriously as he arrived. At the end of Hautman’s book, Mikey, the character who tells the story of the boy Shayne’s arrival and departure, learns a little bit more about his mysterious friend from a detective who left the police department after Shayne left town and did a little research about the boy. No one knows where he is, but learning a little bit more prompts Mikey to write a letter to Shayne. He describes it this way:

I spent most of the night writing a letter to Shayne, telling him thanks, and that we were all okay. I told him that Jon was permanently in a wheelchair, that Trey was going out with Marie, that I had given up on the suits, and that even though I was still the smallest kid in school, I was bigger than I’d been when he knew me. I told him a few other things I thought he might find interesting, like that Dad and I had started shooting baskets every night after dinner. It turned out that he’d always wanted to, but he thought that I wanted him to leave me alone. Also, I wrote how Trey and I were helping Dad build that backyard fountain where the stump used to be. Five copper goldfish shooting water from their mouths. It was going to be amazingly cool.

And I told him that even though we were all doing well, we missed him.

I signed the letter and put it in an envelope with some pictures I’d taken of Marie and Dad and of the fountain we were building. I wrote, “Shayne Blank, aka Herman LaRose [he’d learned the boys birth name form the detective]” on the front, but I left the address blank.

If I ever found out where he had gone, I would fill it in and send it to him.

 Letters can be time capsules of periods in our lives. And letters allow us to participate in a conversation we wish we could have. Whether we send them or keep them or both, write them in computer documents, in journals or in blogs, we are reaching in and reaching out–finding what we have inside that we want others to know, finding out why we want them to know it. Having an audience in mind as we explore a topic focuses us. We write in order to be heard and imagining someone hearing us, really hearing us, helps us gather our thoughts.

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If you get hooked on the letter form, you’ll find many ways to enjoy literature in letters. Here are a few of my favorites (Please let us know yours in the comment box below the article):

Novels
84 Charring Cross Road and Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (La) by Helene Hanff
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Poetry
31 Letters and 13 Dreams by Richard Hugo
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Nonfiction
Letter to My Daughers by Barak Obama
The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours by Marian Wright Edelman
When No One Understands, Letters to a Teenager on Life, Loss, and the Hard Road to Adulthood by Brad Sachs, PhD
Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down by my co-writer Christi Killien and me
The forthcoming The Pen and the Bell by Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes

We study letter writing as an art form even if the letters are not meant to be sent because they help us “resolve and renew” as author Lauren B. Smith writes in her book Unsent Letters. Having an audience in mind as we explore a topic focuses us. We write in order to be heard and imagining someone hearing us, really hearing us, helps us gather our thoughts.