Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

77 Laguna Avenue

Bloomington, MN 55420

Dear Mr. Young,

Ms. Vanessa Cuddigan has asked me to submit a letter of reference to your poorly spelled organization on her behalf. While I have only praise for Ms. Cuddigan, who graduated two years ago with a major in English, I had expected her to ask that I recommend her for graduate school. Instead, having completed a stint with Teach for America, she is now apparently desirous of some sort of data-entry position with your firm — clearly a soul-squelching enterprise. I have asked her to explain herself but she is evasive, leading me to wonder if something unfortunate happened during the past two years to destroy her ambition.

Should you hire Ms. Cuddigan you will find her thoroughly impressive. She is extremely bright, her insights are fresh, and she has a talent for synthesizing heterogeneous ideas into compelling interpretations of the assigned material. Were she applying to graduate school as I have repeatedly urged her to do, I would take the time here to describe her thesis, a sterling examination of the concept of secrecy in the work of two contemporary novelists, Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Safran Foer, but she has made her Faustian bargain and pinned her newly constricted hopes on Kompu-Metricka, so I will limit myself to recommending her on the basis of her brilliant analytical imagination, her invariable originality of approach, her open-mindedness, and her impeccable character.

You or any other employer will be very fortunate to hire a person such as Ms. Cuddigan, who may one day rise to leadership in your organization, at which point I trust it will adopt a more reasonable spelling. In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.

Keeping the torch aloft, I remain

Jay Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English

Author (i.e., books)

Janet Matthias- Fitger

Law School Admissions

17 Pitlinger Hall

Janet:

Sending this in haste and perturbation, and hoping this letter finds you cheerfully disposed toward your onetime spouse … I have a graduate student, I believe I told you about him — his name is Browles and he needs a job that will cover his spring tuition. I had hoped to tuck him away for a productive month or two at Bentham, but Eleanor slammed the door in his face, then compounded the insult by offering a six-month residency to one of his classmates, a tepid memoir writer named Vivian Zelles. (Please tell me you haven’t corresponded with Eleanor about this; have you?)

I appeal not to your long-lost affection for me but your sense of fairness: your law school professors are sitting on tuffets of money over there in Pitlinger, what with old attorneys dying and, graveside, signing over their estates to ensure that every lowly assistant professor gets a research account and a stack of gold bars; here in Willard, on the other hand, the penurious and despondent — with Browles as exemplar — are shuffling back and forth on a stage set from the end of the world.

Janet: Did you know that Madelyne TV died? I just had a letter returned to me from her office, stamped DECEASED. I saw her ten or twelve years ago at a conference in Denver and she looked just the same: that crop of wild hair, the fingers happily cluttered with thick silver rings. I remember her twirling those rings around her fingers at the Seminar table while we waited for HRH’s pronouncements, our collective anxiety manifesting itself in the revolutions of those silver bands. It’s impossible to think of someone as sparkling as Madelyne ailing and dying; at least she made a valuable life outside academia: working with PTSD sufferers must have been a relief, a step in the direction of clearheaded sanity. Poor sweet lovely TV.

Perhaps your ex-wifely radar has discerned my fatigue. Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I’m living the life of a fruit fly — the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a “fresh start” that leads to the same moribund conclusions. I suppose MTV’s death has hit me hard — and with Troy reappearing (I wish I knew how to help him) and Eleanor wielding the guillotine at Bentham … Well, the timing stings.

In regard to funding for Browles — there’s more at stake in this case than support for one student. If he can finish this accursed book and sell it, I can use his success to argue for the continuance — or reinstatement — of our graduate program. Unfortunately, Browles doesn’t look the part of the poster child: he can be maddeningly inert, and I just found out that, entirely disregarding my advice, he allowed his registration to lapse. Still, should funding arrive in the guise of a law professor requiring a graduate assistant, I’m sure Carole will manage the reregistration. (After a setback involving an artichoke salad, she’s agreed to speak to me again on a limited basis — but only at work between the hours of one-thirty and four.) In case you’re worried that, as my protégé, Browles might be writing a novel about Payne or about recognizable people on campus — I assure you, he has better material. Find him a job and he’ll work his butt off, and I’ll maintain a grateful but dignified distance so that no one in Pitlinger will associate your orotund ex-husband with the new RA.

With the usual regrets and reminiscences,

J

P.S.: Our annual lunch on February 3 at Cava, yes? I’m finished with class at 12:30 …

Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart

“35 Years of High Spirits”

Dan Stimmson, Proprietor

609 Faygre Avenue

Saint Paul, MN 55101

Dear Mr. Stimmson,

This letter recommends to you my student, Steve Geng, who has applied to Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart in the pursuit of a part-time position. Mr. Geng is a senior here at the university, an English/Spanish double major who finagled his way into an independent study (typically I manage to dodge such requests) — namely, the creation of a mini-anthology of short hallucinatory narratives, each of which begins with a young male speaker (coincidentally named Steve Geng) who has ingested a controlled substance. I believe narrative #1 relies on Adderall, numero dos on mushrooms, and #3 on gin.

Comely and articulate, Mr. Geng is prone to dreamy non sequiturs that have endeared him to his peers. I predict that young women will flock to your store in the hopes of hearing him decipher the labels on Chilean and Argentinean wine.

Salud!

Jay Fitger, Professor, Payne University

Ken Doyle, Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Dear Ken,

You must have heard by now the sad news about MTV: a heart attack, instantaneous — she was fifty-six. Janet and I will raise a glass in her memory at our “divorce anniversary” lunch next week; I wish MTV and I had kept more closely in touch.

In other unnerving Seminar alumni news I’ve heard from Troy: the poor bastard is back in the U.S. after a decade in India and is scouring the private sector for jobs. The letter I got from him was short and cryptic; it made me envision him living in a canvas tent and washing his underwear in a stream. His only address seems to be a P.O. box. I didn’t tell him about MTV, being loath to notify a person with Troy’s history about anyone’s demise … Has he written to you? The idea of a writer with Troy’s luminous gifts selling widgets — I find it painful. My intuition tells me he wouldn’t have reestablished contact unless he was writing. Put that in your agent’s pipe and smoke it.