It began in 2013 as a question posed by Off Assignment: Who haunts you? It’s a brilliant premise (and excellent writing prompt): write a letter to someone, anyone, who has stayed with you. I wrote about a man I met in southern India, who spoke to me of dancing cobras.
The stories amassed and writer Colleen Kinder decided to collect them into an anthology. Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us came out this spring from Algonquin. Pieces by Lauren Groff, Leslie Jamison, Pico Iyer, Lia Purpura, Lavinia Spalding (who led me to Off Assignment so long back!), Irina Reyn and so many others each tell a story that is short, precise and aching in some deeply human way.
- Publisher’s Weekly review
- A nice mention in Shondaland.
- A lengthy piece in the LA Times.
- Lithub featured an event at Greenlight Books on their Virtual Book Channel.
- Featured on the Frommer’s podcast
- A few hot minutes on “What’s the Story” with Joy Lazendorfer
- And the very last Letter to a Stranger event, hosted by the L.A. Times Book Club
And here’s a video of an event I did with Book Passage in San Francisco with Colleen Kinder, Lavinia Spalding, Akemi Johnson, Faith Adiele, Emmanuel Iduma, and Anna Vodicka:
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