What Clever Friends
The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison
Writing between two women writers
Description
What Clever Friends, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, is a selection of engaging, frank letters between poet Jane Kenyon and fiction writer Alice Mattison. Ranging from their first meeting in 1979 to Kenyon’s death in 1995, this fifteen-year conversation between close friends reveals their experiences pursuing writing while living out the responsibilities of ordinary life. Writing to each other often, they help each other, confide in each other, and argue through the strains of rejection and acceptance, good reviews and bad, periods in which writing comes easily or when it does not. Over time, both writers emerged from obscurity to gain award-winning recognition as prominent voices in their respective genres.
Witty, tender, and aware; tempestuous and lyrical, these letters trace the evolution of a deep and largely unknown friendship that situates Kenyon’s work within a collaborative environment of other poets and novelists who were committed to the flourishing of contemporary women’s writing. With more than 500 edited and annotated letters, a retrospective foreword written by Alice Mattison, and a scholarly introduction written by Chad Wriglesworth, What Clever Friends conveys a compelling story that will interest readers and writers.
Chad Wriglesworth is Associate Professor of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo.
Reviews
“What Clever Friends is an insightful, thought-provoking, funny, heartbreaking, and passionate collection of letters between two friends navigating their lives and careers as American writers. That the ordinary reader and academic scholar may share a better understanding of Jane Kenyon’s trajectory as a writer, the sources of her development and the circumstances that hindered it, and the anguish and joy prompted by her day-to-day work, is a gift.”
- Joyce Peseroff, University of Massachusetts Boston
“[A]n absorbing, thought-provoking, and celebratory volume, illustrating the power of the written word, a survey of the correspondents’ life work through a personal, cheerful, and regular exchange via the U.S. mail. It engaged me fully and has left me with a desire to read more of both authors’ works and to write more letters of my own. What clever friends they were, and what clever friends I have acquired.”
- Rebecca Leamon, The Arts Fuse