What is the purpose of writing letters to people whom we see all the time, in intimate spaces?
How can a personal letter also be political?
Why might a letter allow us to include more emotional knowledge and personal feelings than an essay or article?
Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.
For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.
I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!
Excerpt from Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, USA, pp. 91-2):
One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, "We don't know these folks! Be cool!" I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it, that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed.
Keywords:
* Black American literary dialogue
* Bodies
* “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” (7)
* Bildungsroman
* Freedom and shame
* Prince Jones
* Dreamers
Texts:
* American media and the Dream (Boston University)
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