When a writer writes you back…

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Have you ever written to an author whose work leaves you a little gobsmacked?

I did — first when I was 12 and at summer camp for eight weeks in the wilds of northern Ontario. I was deeply into American science fiction author Ray Bradbury, loving his The Illustrated Man and other collected stories. I needed to tell him how great he was! So I wrote him a letter, care of his New York City publisher, Ballantine.

Imagine my shock and delight when, within a week or two, I received a pale blue personalized card (which I still treasure!) from Los Angeles, hand-signed by one of the nation’s greatest writers, author of Fahrenheit 451, among many other classics. I had begged him to “please keep writing!” and he assured me that he would.

The card had his return home address. He was real!

It is hard to over-state the effect this speedy and generous gesture had on a young girl who lived to read and, even then, was winning prizes for her writing. That someone so famous and well-respected would even bother to read mail, let alone answer it personally…

So, at 20, I did it again, writing this time to John Cheever, another national legend (much more popular in the 1980s), praising his odd but moving novel, Falconer. I loved it. (The New York Times called it “one of the most important novels of our time.”) My enthusiasm, then, was hardly unique to me, some random young woman in Toronto.

He, too, wrote back promptly on personal stationery — he lived in Ossining, New York, a suburb about 30 miles north of Manhattan.

Traveling alone through Europe, reading his collected short stories, I kept encountering a phrase I did not understand: “to shoot one’s cuffs.”

So I wrote him back to ask what it meant. (Let me explain I was: a) on the road b) alone c) in Portugal where no one spoke English d) Google had not been invented!)

He answered again.

The world is a small and odd place for writers. His daughter, Susan Cheever, another writer, praised my first book — and I met his son, Ben, another author, last fall at a local library event while promoting my second book.

I now live a 15-minute drive south of Ossining.

Last week, a 12-year-old girl living in a midwestern city wrote me a letter — first introduced by her father (both of them total strangers to me) — asking if she might interview me by email for a class project on bullying; she’d found my USA Today essay on it.

Of course, I said, replying immediately. I gave her a long, detailed and personal answer to her thoughtful questions.

Classmates now see her “as rock star”, her Dad told me, for having gotten a twice-published author to help her out.

I was 12 when I first reached out — and felt the firm hand of a fellow writer, far, far away from me in age, accomplishment and geography meet me in return.

How could I not?

Have you ever written to someone whose creative work you admire?

What happened?

Approaching Your Idol: Ray Bradbury Wrote To Somerset Maugham (Who Replied), And I Wrote To Bradbury (Who Replied)

Ray Brabdbury, one of my idols. Image via Wikipedia

If you ever dreamed of entering a specific profession, you might have found someone, even you were very young, who inspired you. If you were bold, and lucky, and wrote to them, they might have written you back:

Contact! Connection! Inspiration!

Ray Bradbury, whose work I discovered when I was 12 — and which so made me want to become a writer — did this when he discovered the work of British author Somerset Maugham.

From a recent story in The Wall Street Journal:

On an upstairs-corridor wall, for instance, hangs a sepia-tinted photograph of the English author W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). “He was a big influence,” says a white-thatched Mr. Bradbury, seated nearby like a benevolent wizard. “I loved his short stories, and I wrote him when I was 39 years old; I wrote a fan letter, and sent him my first book of stories. And Somerset Maugham wrote back and said: ‘I think Edgar Allan Poe would have liked some of these stories.’ Isn’t that a great thing for him to say?”

I was at summer camp way up north in Ontario when I wrote to Ray Bradbury, begging him to not stop writing, I so loved his work. I was 12, and hopefully mailed my letter to his Manhattan publisher, Ballantine. To my delighted shock, within a week or two, I received a blue paper personalized postcard from him (with his return address) with his felt-tip-pen signature — and his typewritten reassurance that he would, indeed, keep writing.

I treasured his card then, as I still do today. I wrote, twice, in my 20s, to John Cheever — whose former home lies about a 2o-minute drive north of mine — and he, graciously, wrote me back both times, also on personal stationery.

I simply couldn’t imagine writers of their stature and skill taking the time to read and answer, but they did. And that left an enormous impression on me. I was touched by their graciousness and, since then, have realized that the life of a writer — certainly pre-Internet and email! — can be an isolated one. Even though millions of readers enjoy your printed, published work, depending what you write and for whom, it’s rare for some to reach out and let you know that, and a treasured moment.

Every writer shares this: you put your bum in the chair (as Margaret Atwood told me, when I was the editor of our high school paper and she, a graduate of that school, became my first Big Name interview) — and write. It’s what we choose to do, but lonely. Hearing back from someone so insanely accomplished I remember the plot-lines of several of his short stories decades after reading them made me realize he, too, appreciated being appreciated.

Have you ever reached out, in gratitude and admiration, to someone well-known and accomplished whose work you distantly admire?

What happened?

Reading Books For Pleasure. Radical Idea!

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Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. — Groucho Marx

Can you live a day — a week, a month, a year — without reading a book? Whether on a Kindle, borrowed from a friend or the library (i.e. depriving us authors of our desperately needed royalties), bought for 50 cents at a yard sale or thrift store, or, maybe, purchased at full price in hardcover, are you still reading books at all?

Gotta love the irony that the film (which, of course, began with a blog) “Julie and Julia” has now turned Julia Child’s cookbook into a best-seller. “This was a secret dream,” Nora Ephron, the film’s writer and director, recently told The New York Times, “that the movie would sell a lot of books. I’m completely delighted that people are walking out of the multiplex and into the bookstore.”

The Wall Street Journal recently ran this essay on why so many of us turned away from modernist novels — with all the allure of eating overcooked vegetables in their pitiless difficulty — and started reading fun stuff about vampires instead. The New York Times, in a front-page story this weekend, focused on a schoolteacher taking the radical (?) step of letting her students read what they prefer, albeit nudging some of them toward tougher and more challenging material, instead of the same-old “To Kill A Mockingbird” and its reading-list equivalents. I don’t have kids, but if they did, they’d have grown up as I did, in a home where every shelf is filled with books, from reference works on art, design and architecture to cookbooks, travel guides and fiction. A life without books is, for me, a life without oxygen.