Appalachian Review

I sit down to write a letter so I can hear another person listening. So I can be changed into myself. I can say: it is prematurely spring here in February, and I join my present to yours—the present of my writing to the present of your reading, which I must imagine. The letter is a physical trace of me, but it is also my self disembodied; it bears the press of our [End Page 98] bodies, their youth and their age, as I write and as you open the envelope at your desk and the dog nuzzles to go out and you pause at page three and will come back to it soon.

In this time in our history, of pandemic quarantine and great social division, letters are one way to hold others close. Yet the closeness we feel from a letter is wonderfully strange, since it is a nearness predicated on distance. The addressee is pulsingly present in her absence. For me, letters can generate thoughts which have been inchoate until I suddenly have a specific audience for whom to focus them. As language in a letter invokes its audience, the Other gives shape to the self's interior. In this invocation, there's a disruption of the Other into the sovereign self, and this disruption seems to me the dynamic heart of the epistle, and of literature that takes on epistolary form.

I began researching the form when I was writing my epistolary novel Call It Horses (forthcoming from Dzanc Books in March 2021). In early drafts, the novel's straightforward first-person seemed at once unwieldy and lethargic—to whom was my narrator Frankie speaking and why? Suddenly, I had her writing a letter in her dollar-store notebook to Ruth, her aunt's lover who is a linguist, and the voice calibrated itself; the narrator's project became urgent with the need to tell and reckon with. All epistles are provoked and present an evident need, so one gift of this form is immediate purpose and urgency.

The umbrella of epistolary literature technically includes any work written as a series of documents, or one that integrates documents, such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, legal files, Facebook posts, tweets. In this essay, though, I will limit our document-focus to the root word of the genre, the epistle, the letter. With a few exceptions, we write to people who are absent from us, often because we long for them in some way; thus, when literature adopts the letter form, longing is on display and absence becomes a narrative force. Wonderful [End Page 99] polarities are at play—between the said and the unsaid, distance and intimacy, the reader's experience as confidant and that of eavesdropper, the veracity we attribute to a document and the unreliability of letters that lie. The potential for energy, urgency, and narrative pressure is enormous.

Three works have especially illuminated for me the generative power of the epistolary frame: the unread letters in Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, the letter of occasion in Jane McCafferty's story "Thank You for the Music," and the "found letters" of competing truths in Alice Munro's story "A Wilderness Station."

Alice Walker's beloved novel The Color Purple is composed of diaristic letters to God written by Celie, a bereft and abused African-American child bride in the South; later in the book, she addresses her letters to her sister Nettie, a missionary to Africa for whom Celie has no address. Nettie's letters to Celie are eventually included as well, though Nettie assumes the letters will go unread because of Celie's oppressive husband, who does indeed hide them. Thus, the novel is a sheaf of letters written without hope of response or connection; as such, the novel's letters are more like journal entries documenting Celie's yearning for a self in the midst of trauma, her attempts to reconcile a fractured life, and both sisters' insuppressible need to tell. But the unresponsive addressee is palpably present in the letters, lending a more specific and...