This marks the beginning of a series of letters between the writers Claudia Dey and Stacey Levine, who are reading each others’ work for the first time. Claudia Dey (pictured here, the author of the first letter) is a playwright and novelist who lives in Toronto. She most recently published a sex manual adapted from her newspaper columns, titled How To Be a Bush Pilot. Stacey Levine is the author of two novels, two story collections, and a play; her most recent collection is titled The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales and Stories. She lives in Seattle.

April 19, 2012

Dear Stacey,

I like to picture you in your apartment in Seattle with at least one impractical collection. My son found a human tooth in the park last night and immediately put it in his jean pocket. This sentence from Frances Johnson is perfect and novel-sized in itself: “Frances had begun to discover the quiet adventure in knowing another human being, and with this came the desire to flee.” Yesterday, I spoke with a woman who had the letters, FTA, tattooed to her wrist. She explained that they were from a pin Patti Smith wore on her lapel in 1978, and FTA stands for Focus Thine Anarchy.

All right, I will.

I have a lot of questions for you, but will begin with this one: Recently, a writer, so laidback in his size thirteen boots, told me he does not nurse things, he just writes them down as they come and part way through thinks, Oh, I guess I am writing about these people in these circumstances now. Do you nurse things? Or do they tumble forth and, possessed of an intelligence separate from your own, assemble themselves in narrative form? Can you tell me about the influence of Gertrude Stein on your work? And I will chance, Lydia Davis and Jean Rhys? How would you describe the act of living when you are between books? Can you tell me about your bicycle helmet stage? Were you between books?

So, our letters are blind dates and I am hoping you might do the tablecloth trick at some point.

This is how I heard about the death of Rasputin: I was up north for three weeks shooting an indie horror movie in an uninhabited cottage community in northern Ontario. If you really track that sentence, it starts off glamorously and ends less so. The ice on the lake was two feet thick and when you walked through the snowdrifts, you would fall in up to your waist. There was a guy in the crew, the sound guy, who had the tic of clearing his throat after anyone else did....