Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

With genuine as well as vicarious pleasure,

J. Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English

Payne University

Author, Stain; Alphabetical Stars; Save Me for Later; and Transfer of Affection

Office of Mental Health and Wellness

Intervention Team

Attention: Suzanne Gross, MSW, LP

Dear Ms. Gross,

Having disposed of the budding psychopath, Mr. Wyatt Innes, I am sending to your office with this letter in hand a human bath of tears named Ida Lin-Smith, who tells me she called your office for an appointment and was turned away. I did not inquire as to her malady, but a simple glance in her direction suffices to inform me that she requires attention. Please offer her something more lasting and substantial than guided breathing or twenty minutes with a golden retriever.

I sometimes wonder, Ms. Gross, about the source of such widespread unhappiness. I imagine a manufactory of anxiety and sorrow belching out clouds of discontent on the north side of campus. (Some miseries, of course, are self-inflicted. You are probably aware of my e-mail fiasco at the end of last summer, my “reply to all” message disclosing to every member of the faculty, staff, and administration my desire to rekindle a relationship with my ex-wife, Janet Matthias — a blunder that inspired the good Carole Samarkind to sever forever our romantic ties. I am increasingly prone to mistakes of this sort, perhaps because of the ticker tape of LORs that travels ceaselessly through my pen. Please admit this woman into your program. Please give this unsocialized person some funding. Please offer this mediocre student a chance to improve his condition. Pleasepleasepleaseplease .)

Never mind, Ms. Gross. I advocate here for the lachrymose Ms. Lin-Smith — still weeping patiently in my office chair — and not for myself. I am fine, I assure you.

Yours in this watery chasm,

Professor Jay Fitger

Theodore Boti, Kapellmeister and Chair

Department of English

Dear Ted,

In response to your clarion call for nominations for the four-hundred-dollar summer research fellowship for undergraduate majors (can’t we locate some wealthier donors? over in the business school, bronze plaques are crowded with the names of benefactor alums), I hereby forward the application of Gunnar Lang.

Lang has done a knock-up job in the department this year, mastering the enigmas of copying, stapling, and filing; furthermore, you may recall that he was nearly decapitated back in December by a chunk of plaster that fell from the ceiling onto the fax machine while he was standing beside it — this only twenty-four hours after the engineers chuckled away our anxieties about the crevasse that had opened like a kraken’s mouth above the mailroom door.

Lang is proposing next year to produce an exegesis of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods; if awarded the funds he will presumably put them to use in July and August by availing himself of the foul-smelling vending machine sandwiches in Appleton Library while immersing himself in a study of narrative uncertainty and violence: a summer well spent. Furthermore, Lang is unflappable about the near beheading and has not yet sued us. The four hundred dollars seems a small price to pay for his silence.

I can vouch for Lang’s integrity, having seen him deposit fifty cents in the till in exchange for the liquid our department elects to call coffee. (Franklin Kentrell, on the other hand, has been known to regard the coffee till as a personal scholarship fund for his lunch.)

Please bestow the fellowship on Lang.

Signing off with the usual commitment to righteousness and justice,

Jay Fitger, Winner’s Circle

American Letter of Recommendation Society

P.S.: I assume it was someone’s idea of a joke to insert in the minutes from last week’s budget meeting the idea of my serving as associate chair? Given your three-year mandate to “turn English around,” I presumed that — if you needed assistance quelling the rabble — you’d search for some hapless junior faculty member who lacked the clout to refuse. As for me, I am probably the least likely associate chair you could find. No one would listen to me; I seldom listen to myself.

Leticia Alistair

Flanders Nut House

771 Glass Lake Road

Glass Lake, WI 54153

Dear Ms. Alistair,

This letter recommends to you my student, Oliver Postiglione, who informs me that he has applied for a summer job at Flanders Nut House at the south end of Glass Lake. In a strange coincidence, I spent one summer — during my teenage years, but indelibly impressed upon me — in the timeless village of Glass Lake; and as if I were at this very moment standing on the cracked sidewalk in front of it, I can envision the screen door of the Nut House slapping shut in the breeze and recall the smell of my favorite purchase, the roasted almonds wrapped, still warm and lightly salted, in a paper cone. I hope for the sake of Mr. Postiglione’s dignity your establishment no longer requires its most junior employee to dress as a human cashew.

You will want to ascertain that Mr. Postiglione is trustworthy, hardworking, and of pleasant affect: he is all three. A member of my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop, he is currently writing a one-act play about a serial killer/scientist who saves humankind from a world-ending virus by discovering a method of harvesting corpses to create a vaccine. The concept is gruesome and not very original, but Mr. Postiglione’s workmanlike approach to the project’s completion is to be admired.

I hope the gold lettering continues to grace the façade of the Nut House, its broad front window perfectly reflecting the water’s stillness. Though I have not returned to Glass Lake for forty years, one never forgets the places in which one felt pure.

As for Mr. Postiglione: he will learn quickly, whether waiting on customers behind the pristine white tile counter or assisting with packages in back. I recommend him to you warmly and without hesitation, in part because writing letters of reference such as this one allows me to reinhabit, if only fleetingly, the pensive, knock-kneed person I once was and to advocate for that former version of myself as well as for Oliver Postiglione. Please do hire him; I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life.

Commemoratively,

Jason T. Fitger

Professor of Creative Writing and English

Payne University

Philip Hinckler, Dean

College of Arts and Sciences

1 MacNeil Hall

Dear Dean Hinckler,

Firmly situated between the proverbial rock and its opposing hard place, I am in this letter recommending that your office, in its infinite wisdom, renew and continue the provisional appointment of Theodore Boti, social scientist cum litterateur, as English Department chair. In my wildest nightmares I never imagined that I would make or endorse such a recommendation, akin to Hamlet naming Uncle Claudius counsel ( Hamlet is a play by a writer named William Shakespeare; I’ll send you a copy on some other occasion) — but these are desperate and difficult times.

Mindful of your office’s infatuation with all things pithy and straightforward,* I offer below a cogent list of reasons why Boti — duck out of water that he is — should continue as chair.

1. A single year of any administrative responsibility is pointless. Boti hasn’t yet reached the first fat dot on the learning curve. As chair, he will most likely fail — after which my colleagues and I will condemn him — but subsequent to a traditional three-year term, our condemnation and Boti’s failure will be seen to occur on more solid ground.