Fan letters

Back in March, I wrote Dorothy Bryant a fan letter, partly because her website said (at that time) that the way to order copies of her books was by e-mailing her directly.

Dear Ms. Bryant,

I own two of your books – Miss Giardino and Kin of Ata – and whenever I find myself browsing through either of them I ask myself why I haven’t bought all the others.  (I have given copies of Miss Giardino to several friends, and have never yet made it through a reading without tears.)  But then I go online, find your ordering information, and something distracts me or I decide my budget doesn’t look right … or something.  And a lot of time intervenes before I do it all again.  Pure dithering.

This time I’m actually writing you, which should make it harder for me to lose the thread.  On your website you say to contact you directly to purchase any of five books, and any of the plays.  So let me ask you, please: what do they cost?  What does it take to order them?  I may not actually order one of EVERYthing all at once; but even if I decide to ration myself to ordering only a few now and some more later, I’d be interested (at a minimum) in A Day in San Francisco, Myths to Lie By, and Eros in Love, … probably also Killing Wonder.  That is, I expect that I would enjoy anything you have published but I figure it might also be healthy to pace myself.  :-)

I realize that this e-mail sounds gushing; please forgive me.  But I am trying to write briskly before I get derailed again.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards, Hosea Tanatu

Her reply was friendly but just a little disappointing:

Dear Hosea Tanatu,

I’m no longer filling direct orders. Sorry I haven’t updated the website. Your best bet is to order through your local bookstore. If they are not in touch with a distributor that stocks my books, ask them to try Amazon.com or some other, larger source. (try used book stores too) I no longer provide play scripts, which were never published as bound books. (I xeroxed pages for theater companies who approached me, planning a production.)

Thank you for your interest.

Dorothy Bryant

Well, as you know if you have been following me at all, I've been bingeing on her work since then.  So today I wrote her a slightly different kind of letter, ... not asking her for anything but just to thank her for writing such good books.

Dear Mrs. Bryant,

I did as you suggested last March, and scouted other sources for your books.  As a result, in the ensuing five months I have now read Ella Price, Madame Psyche, Killing Wonder, and most of the pieces in Myths to Lie By; and I have spent several hours thumbing through Writing a Novel.  (This is in addition to Miss Giardino and Kin of Ata, which I first read many years ago.)  More will follow, as I can get them.

 

Killing Wonder was the one I finished most recently (a couple of nights ago), and I have to admit I smiled several times through it … both at the submerged references to your own fiction (Emma Pride, Dream Witch, and others), and at the not-so-submerged echoes of ideas that you worked out also in other ways, in other places.

I regret now that I didn't start my buying spree earlier, so that – back when you were still filling orders directly – I could have bought "all twenty-three, new, in hardback" as Jane put it to Jessamyn.  :-)  I'm sorry.  But I want to thank you for writing so consistently, so thoughtfully, and so well.  This may be one respect in which it is just as well that books are not published anonymously, because at least knowing who you are affords me an address where I can send my thanks.

In the unlikely [highly unlikely!] event that anybody ever asks my advice for devising a syllabus to support a program of spiritual education, my first answer will be, "Read everything by Dorothy Bryant that you can lay your hands on."

Again, thank you.