CLAUDIA MORENO PARSONS & MEGAN PASLAWSKI | LUCIA BERLIN LETTERS

From Claudia Moreno Parsons and Megan Paslawski: First thoughts on the letters of writer Lucia Berlin to the writers Edward Dorn and Jennifer Dorn.

I came to Lucia Berlin’s letters, as I’ve come to many of the writers who have stuck with me in one way or another, through the poet Edward Dorn. Before I knew her as a short story writer, I knew her as a letter writer – the Dorn archive is full of letters (to her, from her, ones that mention her name) documenting his friendship with Berlin. The thing that for me is most striking about Berlin’s letters is the reality of them – of Lucia herself as a person, and of the Dorns, to whom she was writing. The thing about letters between writers, I’ve found, is that they can get very writerly. They’re so often written with an eye outside of whoever is being written to, with that eye that’s always thinking about the next publication, about legacy and the future. Letters between writers can get performative – this doesn’t make them uninteresting, but reading them makes you part of this literary game where you, along with the writer, are thinking outside and beyond the sender and the receiver. Which is okay, because what are writers if not part of the world?

But – when you read Lucia Berlin’s letters, the game drops away, and what you have are real words between real people – her letters are alive, and they bring to life both Lucia and whoever she’s writing to. In her tone and her choice of words, in her direct responses, you have the sense that she’s looking her reader in the eye, talking to you, waiting for you to say something back, to respond and think about what she’s saying. Because she’s taken the time to do that for her reader – she’s really thought about what you’ve said to her, and she creates this dialogue that isn’t abstract or theoretical but is absolute in its reality. In this February 1985 letter to Ed and Jennifer Dorn, she says, “It’s so grounding, always, to hear from you.” I would describe Berlin’s own words this way too – they put you in a real place and time, letting you bask in the sparks her language creates.

The letters between Lucia Berlin, Ed Dorn, and Jennifer Dorn are extraordinary. She writes to the Dorns about her writing – “Fee’s letter did hit a few nerves” – and her alcoholism, her poverty, all the things that make up her life with dark humor and clarity.

Oh, no, Jenny I do not distrust the notion of “having it easy” at all. I am “categorically opposed to poverty.” I have just never come to terms with taking care of responsibility for myself. I think it’s finally hit me that nobody else is going to, ever. …and this infantile neediness real alcoholic trait.

Reading the letters gives us a window into the real lives of these writers, painting a portrait of friendship, struggle, and the endless, fascinating details of being thinking, breathing, alive people.

I first encountered Lucia Berlin with the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women in 2015. When a posthumous collection of short stories is as good as hers, it awakens pity for a writer’s contemporaries. Why didn’t they realize what they overlooked? But head shaking can dislodge a sense of time, and the words I had to describe the freshness of her voice all claimed her for a different generation’s concerns: a pioneer in autofiction, a woman cleaning dirty realism until she could see her face in it.

Reading Berlin’s letters taught me her own vocabulary to describe her achievements. In this one from 1992, she shows us what readers and writers lost because her thoughts on craft lacked sufficient amplification during her lifetime. Jennie Dorn might have packed more into a postcard than anyone Berlin knew, but Berlin’s letters match her stories in concentrating meaning into a few pages. Here she transmutes a bullfighter’s biography into writing advice. Juan Belmonte legendarily kept his feet on the ground, and Berlin is equally down-to-earth as she cuts at Hemingway, too-intentional literary correspondence, and the feminist at the Village Voice who didn’t like her work. She is as merciless as Belmonte, killer of bulls, when she dispatches her mailman in a flurry of telling details.

The sting in Berlin’s writing accompanies other rich flavors. When she updates the Dorns on her sister Molly, we learn why to value a gossipy letter over literary remarks intended for publication. The comedy of “funny and dear” Molly as a politician’s wife whose chauffeur must bribe utility services and bail people out of jail also emphasizes Berlin’s dread of Molly’s chemo sessions, and her plainness about the lack of empathy caretakers can feel is likely more instructive than three single-spaced pages on Alfred North Whitehead. The tenderness, self-sacrifice, and emotional honesty that intertwine in this moment also mark her fiction.

The overlap between Berlin’s writing and Belmonte’s romantic/brutal discipline is not always comfortable to read, and it resists assimilation into critical narratives that might otherwise have offered her a home. But the writer we meet in these letters is someone committed to ringing true in her own terms.

Claudia Moreno Parsons and Megan Paslawski’s edited collection of Lucia Berlin’s previously unpublished letters will appear from Lost & Found in Fall 2022.