Julie Schumacher on Thirty Years of Correspondence With Her Late Friend, Melissa Bank

On the first anniversary of her death I am thinking, as I often do, of Melissa Bank, author of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot . She and I met in graduate school in 1985, while pursuing MFAs in fiction. When we weren’t struggling over our writing, we read and critiqued each other’s work: Why wasn’t it smarter/funnier/lovelier/subtler/clearer? Would anyone other than our classmates ever read it? What would we do when we finished our degrees? Here’s what we did: I moved to Minnesota with my spouse and taught part-time and had two kids; Melissa moved by herself to New York and worked full-time and got a dog. And because we were both still struggling to write, we kept in touch and sent letters. When Melissa died last summer, I opened the drawer in my desk where I had stored her correspondence, and I lined up thirty years’ worth of her letters, chronologically, on the floor. Only a few of the letters were typed. The rest were handwritten, on greenish notebook paper with a torn row of fringe going down the left side. Melissa’s penmanship—a mix of printing and cursive—bristled with dashes and parentheses; it was legible but not neat, an immediately recognizable scrawl. We rarely emailed, our unspoken understanding being that the phone and computer were for logistics—for arranging a time to meet at the airport or the train. Our letters, on the other hand, were for conversation . Melissa’s fringed pages meandered companionably from subject to subject and seemed to overflow with her thoughts. By the way, she wrote in 2013, I just looked up biweekly in the dictionary and do you know it means every other week or twice weekly? Writing and receiving letters, I think, helped sustain us. I loved those letters. One of the best things about our decades-long correspondence: it was leisurely and incremental, enriched by delay. Typically, a month or more elapsed before one of us answered the other. We wrote back when the epistolary impulse struck. Though we often wrote about our efforts to create, our […]

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