An Open Letter to Writing Open Letters
Here is a short afterword to Manar’s piece, showing the backstory of how it got made (and a little glimpse at our first year together as mentor and mentee). It is not an open letter, but… when a good title presents itself …
I’ve watched Manar write in lots of genres over the course of this year of Girls Write Now—a suspense story that we read afterward and were shocked over how scary a scenario we were capable of conjuring (it involved a haunted house and a dark family secret that was uncovered during—what else?—a trip to Grandma’s house) and an ode to coffee that ended up being an ode to the place where we met every week—an empty Dunkin’ that thoughtfully played terrible pop for us to get distracted by as we sipped iced coffee and wrote.
The genre that Manar liked so much that she chose examples of it for both her Girls Write Now CHAPTERS Reading piece and her submission for this anthology—and the genre that definitely showcases her humor and her thoughtfulness about the world and religion and politics and the past and the future, as well as her frustration that the world is filled with people who don’t think as critically about these subjects as she does—is the open letter. We spent weeks returning to her very open, open letter to ignorance after it first spilled out of her in a quick flood of feelings, but we didn’t change much—she had already thought enough about ignorance lately that she could unspool her thoughts on it concisely in the first try. After we read it out loud the first time, we both looked at each other and said, “Yup, this is pretty good!” We still had many more pieces to write the rest of the semester, but hopefully you agree.