WEB
The Gist: Online Lit Journal Gets Personal
Free
From its title, it sounded like it let you rifle through someone else's mail, or otherwise engage in the online confessionals that make the Web a voyeur's playground. But Open Letters, a six-month experiment in online literature, rescued us from the clickable gutter: It wasn't like viewing porn, or even eavesdropping, because the site exploited the private rather than the prurient.
Between late June of last year and early January of this year, Open Letters charted new territory between intimacy and public space. Editor Paul Tough presented fresh notes five days a week, giving each writer's backstory on a separate page. Then, just as the site was gathering steam, Tough stopped updating its pages, citing a lack of funds and reaffirming the transience of the Web. But the archive continues to serve as a testament to epistolary form.
The design is stubbornly simple: soothing white space interrupted by line drawings around each dispatch, set in clean, old-fashioned Courier type. Not as topical as Feed's Daily section, less cynical than a Suck piece, and refreshingly indifferent to notoriety, the letters employ first-person writing with the premise of delivering a personal experience. Topics include playing poker, taking ecstasy, moving, falling in love, and voting. Nationally known writers like Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, and Sarah Vowell contribute alongside other folk, such as a 12-year-old Cape Cod girl chronicling her cousin's family problems, a Canadian doctor describing his work with lepers on Saipan, and a Florida writer/waiter lamenting the obsessive, unrequited crush that drove him to lie and shit blood. Reveling in sentiment, the Open Letters archive remains a rich tonic along the lines of a Will Oldham record or a Terrence Malick film.
Open Letters: www.openletters.net.
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