In the summer of 2020, I took a writing workshop with Legacy Russell at Wendy’s Subway. It was about letter writing and we read a lot of love poems, some anti-love poems, Etheridge Knight and Richard Siken and Nikki Giovanni (who is one of my favorite living poets). It was all about addressing writing to someone even if wasn’t really intended to be shared, which is much more complicated than it might seem. So much writing is ultimately really about you. In the final exercise, I think I wrote a letter to a friend of mine who I felt deeply hurt by, and although I don’t really remember what I wrote, I do remember feeling a profound sense that I had failed at the whole point of the workshop.
Letter writing isn’t not about you. But it is a way of trying to relate, to span the gulf between extreme interiority and the assumed objectivity of traditional critical writing. On the internet, where everything mirrors the hectic speed of the breaking news cycle, a lot of writing feels a bit like a s…