Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

I can offer you some informative tidbits should Mr. Mehta resurface for the (unspecified) job with your mysterious firm:

1. Mr. Mehta received a final grade — in my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop — of B+, having completed a short story about a cannibal couple, husband and wife, who find themselves stranded and hungry by a fire pit after a cave-in. Intended to be philosophical rather than humorous, the story nevertheless succeeded in great comic effect.

2. Mr. Mehta’s transcript may give the erroneous impression of indolence, given that he stitched his education together like a crazy quilt over a period of six years. In Mr. Mehta’s defense, I know that he worked almost full-time and had multiple problems with his student loans — byzantine snafus that prevented him from registering on time for required classes. Suffice it to say that I could run the Office of Financial Aid at this institution more efficiently on the back of a dirty envelope than the current dean, with his cabal of neurotic misfits, has managed to do.

Should your firm and Mr. Mehta abandon your respective cloaks of anonymity and locate each other, I believe you will be reasonably satisfied with his organizational and writing skills.

In camera obscura,

J. Fitger, Professor, Creative Writing and English

Janet Matthias-Fitger

Payne University Law School

17 Pitlinger Hall

Dear Janet,

I know you aren’t on the search committee for the administrative assistant position, but to hell with protocol: you’re the only person I know or trust in the law school, everyone understands that you’re pulling the strings over there (your decision to divorce me having increased the esteem in which most staff and faculty hold you), and I’m counting on your willingness to respond to this LOR, because the situation is dire.

Who am I recommending? Louise Frame. You remember Louise from my earlier years in Willard Hall; I believe you once described her as an island of hospitality in the heart of darkness of the department. You may have heard that she accepted the administrative job in Political Science: true, she did, and she happily said yes to their larger salary — but three or four days ago her meth-addict daughter cruised into town just long enough to deposit on Louise’s doorstep a two-year-old whose name is X. Not Xerxes or Xavier, but the letter X , a silent, emotionally scarred creature summarily abandoned in Louise’s kitchen without a suitcase or a toy or clothes. An act of hideous neglect, yes; but according to Louise, given the shape her daughter was in, it was also, possibly, an attempt at redemption and an act of kindness — a second chance for her son.

So. The Poli-Sci job is full-time, and you know those spreadsheet-loving barbarians will work her to death; and because of X having parachuted into her life (he doesn’t yet speak, or she hasn’t heard him do so), Louise needs two months off, minimum, after which you know she’d be the ideal associate administrator you’re looking for, efficient and smart and organized — but you must give her benefits with a 75-percent-time position and match her Poli-Sci salary (the law school can easily afford it) because of the child. I suggested that she make an appointment to see you and she completely broke down. And don’t tell me she should come back to English: the latch on that door has clicked shut behind her; we’ve already hired a semicompetent aphasic at less than half of Louise’s pay.

Perhaps it’s a godsend you and I never had a child.

Did I tell you I wrote to HRH? You may find that a ludicrous gesture, but it occurred to me that he might use his (waning) influence to benefit Browles.* And, by the by, where does Eleanor get off, telling you that Browles’s “Bartleby” excerpt was “an unholy mess”? He hasn’t had adequate time to revise, and he feels like an orphan now that the safety net of the graduate program’s benefits is being sliced out from under his feet. Say what you like about the Seminar: we were all funded back then, and we may not have lived high on the hog, but neither were we plunged into financial crisis. I tell you, Janet, I am becoming soft and sentimental; I spend more and more time thinking back to the group of us hungering around HRH and the Seminar table: our yearning kept us alive and enriched us. And now that our bowls have been filled and we’ve been sent off with our dollops of gruel — what enriches us now?

I so enjoyed our lunch back in February. It was good to hear that you’re writing again. I have a vision of myself from the early days of our marriage, hunched like a bullfrog at the paint-splattered table overlooking the Welligers’ garage, concocting a supposed work of genius and barely mumbling an acknowledgment when you knocked at the door to tell me you were going to accept the job at the law school. You’d sealed your manuscript into a series of manila envelopes and filed them on a shelf in the closet. And there I was, typing like a madman (I used to allow myself a shot of Prairie Vodka after every five pages; I should have smacked my skull with a plank instead), imagining myself a Brilliant Young American Novelist. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Could we schedule an additional lunch this year? Why should we limit ourselves to two?

Louise promised me she would contact you ASAP. Prepare yourself: She used to be stoic and unruffleable, but given the arrival of X (I’ve urged her to file for a birth certificate and lengthen his name), she has become a weeper. Keep an eye on the trembling lower lip.

Forever your ex-spouse,

Jay

P.S.: How did you end up with a copy of the LOR I wrote for Carole, to Shepardville? I agree it was somewhat draconian — and I’ve tried to apologize to Carole, but she won’t answer my e-mails and no longer allows me into her office. Realistically, though: Was I supposed to stand by, twiddling my thumbs, while on my account she threw her career down the toilet? If my LOR outraged you so much, I suppose you could write her a letter yourself. But would Carole interpret that gesture as solidarity? Or as your own (subconscious) desire to see her leave town?

* As for your suggestion that Browles appeal for emergency funding to the grad student council: that body is commandeered, as per usual, by a group of unshaven Stalinists — still, I passed the idea along.

Peter B. Andrews, Executive Editor

Folkstone Publishing

26 Ulysses Avenue, Suite B

Chicago, IL 60618

Dear Peter Andrews,

In response to your e-mail query received this morning, I’m delighted to endorse Ken Doyle’s recommendation that Folkstone reissue Troy Larpenteur’s exquisite debut, Second Mind. Second Mind was an underappreciated landmark when Folkstone took a chance and premiered it almost seventeen years ago; now, of course, it’s a cult classic, copies of which are jealously traded and difficult to find. I thoroughly agree with Ken’s suggestion regarding the William Gass remarks — they should be prominently displayed on the front cover — and the reuse of H. Reginald Hanf’s original blurb on the back. You might also solicit a paragraph of praise from Eleanor Acton, who has, as you probably know, offered Troy a coveted teaching-free residency at Bentham. And finally, yes, I can vouch for academic interest in the book, which will be assigned here at Payne and at other universities in both creative writing and contemporary literature classes.

Folkstone’s timing on this reissue is truly fortuitous: Troy’s long-awaited and groundbreaking second volume (sworn to secrecy about its content, I’ve read only a few remarkable excerpts) will more than live up to and increase the buzz surrounding his first.

Please keep me apprised as to the (re)publication schedule, as I generally complete larger orders of required books for classroom use three months ahead, and let me know if there is anything I can do to help promote the work of this very talented man.