I have a wooden box, a small chest, really, covered in ragged leather, in which I keep years of letters, starting with Donna Gardner’s (“it is super fun here without you”) back in the fourth grade. Another box sits on my bookshelf, every letter in it written by the same lovely man, same fellow who made the box and gave it to me. My husband hoards the letters I wrote to him, and I hoard the letters he wrote to me, in our drawers beside our bed. Messy, mixed-in, but we know we are there—those greenhorns we used to be. Who do you know heartless enough to throw a careful letter carelessly away?

I liked writing to Stanley Crawford. I liked that the days were warm when we started, and when we stopped, that winter was closing in. I liked making up a new person who turned out not to be him.

I met Stan and his wife, Rose Mary, on the eastern seaboard, in the lobby of a B&B too dolled up for any of us. I knew his work—the novels, starting with Gascoyne, Some Instructions to My Wife, the splendid The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, and, more recently, Petroleum Man. I knew he had lived and farmed in the Embudo Valley of northern New Mexico for going on forty years, and written three books of nonfiction there. He and Rose Mary built the house they raised their children in: built it from the clay it stands on, made every brick. I was smitten with them both.

Crawford is tall, even sitting down. He is serious, and boyish, and straightaway I could picture him with his dog in his arms fording a swollen river. He isn’t Unguentine, not that cranky, brash, seafaring tyrant, but quiet, and maybe inward, a man accustomed to fixing things, to living in the wind in open country.

—Noy Holland

Dear Stanley Crawford,

I have been trying with no success to know why it is I have waited so long to write to you—waited years, really, since I read you first—and now these many weeks. I could not get over the hurdle of knowing how strange it might be, for you, to write in this now-relatively- intimate manner to a stranger. I know something of your life and you know nothing of mine; it seems a little uncivil, this imbalance, as though I’ve spooked around in your house and fields. I know garlic-planting season is upon you. I know the wind you speak of that BLOWS from March until May. I grew up in New Mexico, a good ways from you, in...