September 13th, 2005

Dear Jonathan Franzen,

It is strange where moments of "Eureka" occur. I was sitting on the toilet in the Entomology wing of the American Museum of Natural History when the latest one fell into my lap. Folded open, spine pinned back, i was reading an article you had written in the New Yorker about bird-watching. You represent to me one of those contemporary authors i try to avoid out of fear that i will hear how un-original my own voice is. As a result of this chauvinism, i've dismissed an entire era of writing (post-1960), insisting that i cannot be bothered by the present when so much past literature requires my attention (how much attention i give it, is another issue altogether). Nonetheless, left with nothing productive to do with my time in the bathroom stall, i let myself read your article, and quickly found myself engrossed.

You wrote a piece that never left the theatre of birdwatching, yet you were able to offer a tome to your glass bubble marriage that finally broke, and continued onto the delicious subject of your post-marriage dating cycle of younger women. In your expansion of these ideas, i found a parallel in my own circumstances, despite the fact you are probably 20 years my senior, and the similarities we share are the stripes on a watermelon's skin rather than the fruit inside. As i neared the end of the piece, i could feel that i'd made up a room in my head where these words and themes could stay for awhile so that i could visit with them and perhaps share a grey, cloudy day over a nice long conversation. I might, i thought, even indulge in my desire to go watch me some birds ever since i picked up that used copy of the Audubon Society's Field Guide of North American Birds at a stoop sale some 3 years earlier. I enjoyed your tone, your language, your relaxation with the written word, and immediately began to feel a little jealous. At this point, the recognition of jealousy, i looked up from my magazine, glanced to my right at the bland, grey metallic wall of the stall, and felt the processing of over 500 mental associations in about three seconds. "Eureka!" The lamp lit.

What i enjoyed about your writing is that you understood from the beginning your reasons for doing, feeling, and being and you articulated them clearly. You didn't litter the page with floral garbage, concealing how you really felt. You knew precisely why you enjoyed birdwatching and how that related to everything else you presented to your readers. You knew this and demonstrated it with such incredible precision and skill.

Now i believe that there exists people who are so connected to their brains that a blank page represents a surface to iron on the decal of their mind, but, alas, i am not one of them. In order for me to demonstrate a similar lucidity, i must be in a constant state of production, because in that effort, i will have expanded my thoughts to their fullest, most hyperbolic illusions. By giving room to every emotion, i can critically glean whether it is native, artificial or poorly identified. What's left is the placement of the quill directly in the grips of my gut. I'll then paint a page with the raw representations of my internal population, which is exactly what i look for in other authors. What i'd like to read is what i like to write. You accomplished this. You illustrated the rare quality of someone who has the anatomical blessing of their head being connected directly to their gut.

There can be, when this occurs, no separation from the writer and the page. To do so would cut off the life support for these types of auteurs. Their words are not approximations of a silhouette cast on the side of a moving elephant. What the reader consumes must be as close to the truth, as near as possible to the force that expels the roots from the seed buried deep in the earth.

I am not quite there. I put so much importance and power into the small, tapered point at the end of my pen, but i need to strive harder to bring it to the paper more often. Thank you for your inspiration.

Most respectfully regards,
DC