We began what would eventually become this project (we just didn’t know it yet!) in 2016, our second year of graduate school. We were reading Renee Gladman’s Calamities for a class and were both taken by the book’s inquiry into the practice of writing—through the mind and physical city-spaces, through time and image. Gladman’s sentences embody a state of reaching beyond the text she’s writing, toward an even wider and wilder ghost essay.

For our final assignment, we decided to engage in a playful correspondence with Gladman and each other. We wanted to read Calamities as an invitation—to see what would happen if we took individual sentences as inquiries that we could then try to expand by sending them back and forth between us. The constraints were simple: one of us would choose a sentence from Gladman and write it on a card as a guiding question and the other would respond back to it on the opposite side. We’d keep going until we ran out of sentences that spoke to us.

We were also reading Dickinson’s collection of envelope poems (edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner) and had a beautiful guest lecture about stitching fascicles by book artists and poets Michelle Lowry Macfarlane and Becky Thomas. Even though we lived near each other and it would have been easier to hand the cards between us directly, we wanted to experience the extra effort and object-quality of mail, how it invites an inefficiency in communication that might also deepen it. Inefficiency in service of a less linear conversation felt like a hot crossover point between Gladman and Dickinson—Gladman’s refusal of direct city routes together with Dickinson’s multidirectional poems.

At the end of the semester we packaged up our letter-poems in a box from an antique store for safekeeping, considering them more personal/process correspondence than something for publication.

Five years later, during the lockdown of the pandemic, our guilty pleasure was watching Alena Smith’s brilliant and complicated Dickinson on opposite sides of the country. In 2016 we weren’t yet connecting our interest in sending correspondence within the same city to how Sue Gilbert Dickinson and Emily Dickinson maintained an epistolary exchange in spite of living in such close proximity. Alena Smith’s version of Sue and Emily’s relationship may be fabulously speculative, but watching the show reminded us about our letters and the particular time period we wrote them.

When we reopened our box of mailed Gladman lines, this was the top card: “Somehow I’d wandered into the middle of a letter.” And there it was! Exactly what we realized we were doing—wandering into the middle of Gladman and Dickinson and the correspondences between a writer and the world and between each other. We also began to consider Dickinson and Gilbert Dickinson’s letter-poems as taking part in a kind collaborative poetics—a process that felt close to the way we began and continue to make together: so much of our writing and thinking, as individuals, has been in conversation with and through one another since we first met, often in ways that wouldn’t be visible to others outside our exchanges.

Rather than communicating to each other across a city, this time we were mostly working together in the same house—a correspondence across different rooms, different moments, different light—a love letter to a Gladmanian process, written through the shared and coded language between Dickinson and Gilbert Dickinson and the city we used to live in.

To continue this idea of collaborative epistolary exchange we’re inviting readers to correspond with us and this project directly. If you place your address in this online form (without your name) we will send you an epistolary object—bridging a bit of the distances this pandemic has continued to widen.