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LettersDecember 02, 2005 I'm nearing the end of copyediting a collection of letters -- well, I've got about 300 pages to go, but when the entire manuscript is 2,000 pages long, that's "nearing the end." The author, a writer and activist with a rich personal history, was born during World War I and died during the Clinton presidency; her correspondence began with letters to her parents when she was still in single digits and continues to the very end of her life. I've been watching the dates on the letters with mounting apprehension as they draw closer to the date of her death. She didn't know what that date would be, but I do and I wish I didn't -- even though it would still be signaled in the steadily diminishing stack of pages to be read. Several long-time correspondents have already dropped out of the onward-flowing river. I miss them. What a loss that so few of us correspond like this anymore, and what a blessing to historians and biographers -- not to mention readers -- that for centuries so many people wrote letters and saved the ones they received. I started off to be a pretty good letter writer. It began to fall apart when I embarked on editing three original anthologies of women's fantasy and science fiction, which appeared in 1989, 1990, and 1991. To be sure, these involved a helluva lot of correspondence, especially with the writers who submitted stories but also with the publisher, booksellers, reviewers, and the like, but it wasn't personal correspondence. It pretty much pushed aside the written-word connections I'd maintained with friends in D.C., which I left in July 1985. Just when I might have been re-establishing those connections -- along came e-mail. I was late getting online: at the urging of my fellow Tiptree Award jurors, I finally did the deed in the early fall of 1994 by joining old GEnie. GEnie's Science Fiction RoundTable was well past its glory days but it was still an interesting place to hang out. I continued to write letters, in a way, but the medium changed the milieu. Very few were the sustained correspondences between me and another person. Far more common were the ongoing conversations that involved many people, most of whom could drop in and drop out again without causing much disturbance in the flow. The focus was on the discussion, not on the personal relationships. The ongoing discussion would spin off conversations between two or three individuals, but these tended to be ephemeral. Occasionally, though, something like a correspondence would develop. For a few years I tried to organize these virtual letters the way I had my written correspondence, with a folder for each correspondent. But the medium changed that too: hard drives were smaller, so I backed everything up onto floppies -- 5 1/4 inch floppies, which neither Morgana IV, my current computer, nor her immediate predecessor could read, and many of which have probably deteriorated enough to be unreadable by anything. After her mother's death, the woman whose correspondence I'm currently wallowing in found a stash of forgotten family letters in an old trunk. Nothing of the sort will ever happen with my floppy disks. By the end of the 1990s, I'd stopped saving e-mail correspondence, both the letters I received and the letters I sent. Compared to letters written or typed on paper, they just didn't seem real enough to go to the trouble of saving. E-mail combines aspects of letter-writing and telephone conversation, and in this the latter aspect won out: I've never recorded or saved my phone conversations, even the interesting ones. Apart from my family, the person I've known the longest in my life is my high school English teacher; we've fallen out of touch several times over the years, but we manage to find each other again. She's the only one who remembers me as Sue. She may also be the only person of my acquaintance who still writes letters; not only does she not use e-mail, she doesn't even have a computer. As she will admit, she's a lousy correspondent; she writes great letters, but there are long, long, long gaps between them. Still, seeing her handwriting in my mailbox reminds me of those receding days when picking up mail brought a little thrill of anticipation. Now the nearest equivalent is finding a check from one of my clients.
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