Hi Ms. Breslin,
I'm quite a fan of your two Letters blogs; I've found them to be wonderful bits of insight straight from the relevant sources.
I saw a recent blog post that commented on your editorial role, showing that you only fix punctuation and a few other bits for readability. I was hoping you could elaborate a bit on how you select the letters, too, to help publicize any potential publication bias (on top of the inevitable self-selection bias that exists). I may be making the incorrect assumption that there are many that come in that you don't publish, but knowing that would be helpful, too.
If I've missed previous discussion of this topic somehow, my apologies.
Thanks!
Ian
Ian:
You're welcome! What you're referring to here, for those following along at home, is the Letters Project: Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. (If you can't figure out what they consist of, I don't know what to tell you.)
Some chick got all up in arms over this issue on a comment to a post about the project that was on Boing Boing. Up until then, I was fixing the punctuation on the letters for clarity. Since then, I haven't been, unless it's something like the first letter of a sentence or a dash where there should be a hyphen. So, the letters run pretty much as I get them now, thanks to that lady.
How do I select the letters? Well, when they arrive in my email box, I read them, and at that point the main thing I'm trying to do is figure out if it's a real letter or a fake one. For some reason, I've gotten a strangely large number of letters that I'm pretty sure are written by men who are pretending to be a woman who has sex with a working girl (a "jane"). I asked a shrink what he thought of this, and he said: Gay. I say, no way. I don't know what's going on with that, but I think it has to do more with inhabiting the sexuality of a woman more so than it has to do with being gay. I don't get a lot of fake letters from johns, per se, except from the guy in BROOKLYN who wrote in ALL CAPS and got into a car accident at the end of his letter in which his PENIS was almost damaged but then wasn't, which he said was an act of God.
I would say I've posted about 3/4 of the john letters. I haven't posted a few of them because they were too gross, too totally boring, or too self-important in some way that just, like, repelled me. I get a lot of letters with johns rapping about how much the chicks really dig them, and she came for real but only with them, and other guys to these girls are johns but not them, and it's not like, you know, this is a showcase for them to explain to the world how much prostitutes love them. That's what TER is for.
I would say I've posted about 2/3 of the working girl letters. Sometimes, they miss the mark, for reasons I can't put my finger on quite yet. They're confused, turned around on themselves. I got one recently that I won't be running from a chick in Germany that involved way too many bodily fluids. For me, anyway.
Generally, I would say most letters get published. And I love, I mean really love many of them. If you're interested, my all-time favorite john letter is "I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done," and my favorite working girl letter at the moment is a letter I should have titled "I Am a Journalist Call Girl." It might sound retarded, but I love that these men and women were brave enough to write these letters.
Mostly, I think they're love stories. Because that's love, isn't it? Totally stripped down bare yourself in front of another to ask that you be loved in spite of yourself.
I wish I would get more.
XOX
The Reverse Cowgirl
