Miss Alcott’s Email: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds is a remarkable memoir by Kit Bakke about a political activist, mother, nurse and management consultant’s midlife review interwoven with a biography of her political and literary soul mate Louisa May Alcott.

From the start of the author’s introduction, I knew that reading the book would put me in the company of people I wanted to hear more about. Like others of her generation, book author Kit’s college and young adult years involved civil disobedience in the hopes of making the world a better place. Now, after graduate school, professional employment and raising two daughters, Kit wonders how to best use the rest of her time on this planet. She realizes that she has much in common with Louisa May Alcott, who was also an activist and, as Kit became, a nurse. She believes Louisa would be especially able to help her figure out what is important in life. Kit emails Louisa about the possibility of an ongoing conversation and gaining comments on essays she will write about Louisa’s life, writing, women’s suffrage and abolitionist activities, Transcendentalism, family, and travels. According to Kit, Louisa:

…never buried her scrapes, never laid aside her ideals, but mined them her whole life to create wealth (“I turn my adventures into bread & butter”), fame and a string of good works. Plus she did it all husbandless in a time when the odds of female success were infinitesimal.

Kit confesses that Louisa wasn’t the first writer she’d written to:

Once I made the mistake of mailing a short story I had written while I was in nursing school to a contemporary writer whom I much admired. Silly me. I liked this author’s stories so much I thought for sure she’d love mine. She did write back, kindly but firmly, telling me that writers were very busy people and that I should never bother any of them ever again.

Presumably, Kit thought, “dead authors would not be so busy.” Believing in “the mysteries of the universe,” Kit hits the send button and catches Louisa not dead, but in the last six months of her life, in the winter of 1887-88. Kit explained that she was “a self-appointed spokeswoman” for herself and her friends, all in their fifties, all starting to think about the rest of their lives once kids were launched and careers fulfilled. And all wanting Louisa’s help.

The project Kit and Louisa agree upon involves Kit reading everything she can find about or by Louisa (Louisa is aghast to learn her journals were not burned as she had requested in her will) and writing short histories “about all the interesting things she [Louisa] had done, the argumentative and creative people she had known, and how she had made her life work.” Kit will then send these histories to Louisa by email for comment and editing. In return for Louisa’s work reading and responding to Kit’s essays, Kit will share the current fate of Louisa’s most heartfelt causes.

I believe admirers of Alcott, those interested in the Transcendentalists, history buffs, and people who enjoy eavesdropping on others will be as drawn into this correspondence as I was (somehow Kit even attaches rosemary and forget-me-nots to cheer Louisa up as she is ill with the effects of earlier mercury poisoning from years before undergoing a “cure” for typhoid fever). Of course, anyone writing a memoir, personal essay, or persuasive nonfiction will enjoy Kit’s presentation of her material.

 They will be absorbed in Kit’s discussions about Louisa’s father, mother, siblings, famous Transcendentalist neighbors, the abolitionist movement, nursing during the Civil War, and the start of the women’s suffrage movement. They will read on interested in how Louisa reacts to what Kit is finding out and writing about. Louisa’s questions about Kit’s times and her comments about a woman who goes by the title Ms., was in the Weatherman underground, raised a daughter as a single mother, and helped many as an oncology nurse are incisive.

Many of us who write memoir fear others will not be interested in what we have to say. Kit uses her imaginative premise to solve this problem: having gained Louisa’s interest, it isn’t hard for the author to gain her readers’ interest. As readers, we are after all following the lead of someone much admired. And, Kit’s genuine thought that her questions are not much different than those of many of her generation brings an egalitarian tone to her writing. Through her project, readers get to know Kit, but they also reflect on their own lives as she reflects on hers and assess how their expressions of commitment measure up.

Each chapter starts and ends with one of the emails Louisa and Kit wrote. Kit’s histories and discussions of Louisa’s life and times are printed between the letters. Kit ends the correspondence with a love letter that reaches Louisa shortly before she dies. In it, she tells Louisa the ways in which Louisa matters to Kit and to so many others: She taught by example that ideas count, that persistence produces results, and that courageous independence brings joy.

Most of all, Kit writes, she appreciates the way Louisa demonstrated that “it is worth the trouble to work hard to make our life into something…and the world is worth bothering about.” Since a person can never know for sure if his or her life will make a difference, the important part that Kit learned from Louisa, is “to make the work worth the effort just by doing it, no matter if anyone is noticing or not.”

And that is what we do as writers most of the time, isn’t it? Louisa May Alcott did not think that her story of the March girls would be of interest to so many, but it was. And once that was true, she wrote more stories about them, inserting her philosophy of life and values into her characters’ dialog. How many people, especially young girls, have had their ambitions and self-esteem heightened by the activities and thoughts of Jo and her sisters?

Kit was not sure how her correspondence with Louisa would turn out, but she was sure everything she read about Louisa would interest her as would investigating all of Louisa’s novels, stories, available journal entries and letters. The book includes a selected bibliography of books that Kit found best provided her with windows into Louisa’s life and a list of works by Louisa May Alcott.

****

Any of us writing our personal experience, no matter the genre, can take inspiration from Kit and her book’s imaginative and beautifully workable premise.

Here are some writing ideas that will help you use material you already have, help you collect material you’ve often thought to collect, and help you write true to life by writing the impossible. When you resonate with one or more of them, you will find there is something real for you. Whatever book, essay collection or series of stories or poems you can imagine already exists; but you must make it manifest on the page. You must, like Kit, become “self-appointed” on the behalf of others and yourself. Louisa once quoted Plato in a letter she wrote to a young friend: “The soul cannot imagine what does not exist because it is the shadow of God who knows & creates all things.”

If you have the letters or journals of others you have been meaning to use in your writing, think about the ways in which those letters resonate with the actions, jobs and situations you have lived through.

Can you write letters that might have inspired those letters you have?

Or, can write answers to the letters you have?

Can you use the journal entries of the other as a spring board for creating journal entries of your own? (You could use journals you’ve kept in the past in place of journals by others.)

Can you use the letters or journal entries you have to introduce the interests of the deceased person and then research those interests to write more about them?

Can you write essays that tell the person whose letters or journals have inspired you about what you have learned and why it matters?

If you have literary or historical soul mates, think about a series of letters (or poems) you might write to one or more of them.

Can you share a moment from your life or observations you’ve made that they might enjoy or understand?

Can you write to update them on what has happened concerning issues and activities that were important to them?

Can you explain why this person matters to you and what you have done as a consequence of knowing about their life, obstacles and achievements?

Can you write for specific guidance, explaining why you need it and then write the guidance you realize they would have given you using quotes from their journals or letters?

Imagine yourself as influential in the future because of your writing, activities or work.

Can you write a fictitious correspondence between yourself and a future person who admires you and needs your guidance and inspiration?

Can you write a correspondence between the self you have become and someone
who didn’t think you’d ever get there, telling how you made it and what you’ve learned?

Can you write an address you might give before an important organization of the future? Or the past?

Can you write to yourself at a younger age? An older age?

****

We all have wisdom to gain by reflecting on the insights of others and on our own questions. Kit has given us an entertaining, exhilarating example of how to offer knowledge and appreciation to others.

Don’t delay. Put some fall herb sprigs or flowers by your desk (my yard has rosemary, branches with rose hips and still flowering mounds of calendula) and start an outline, a project description or even a letter, essay or poem as if you had a deadline; “make the work worth the effort just by doing it, no matter if anyone is noticing or not.”