Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please e-mail editor@pw.org or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
Letters
Feedback from readers
I so enjoyed the special section The Writer’s How-to Guide (September/October 2025) and immediately shared it with the students in the low-residency MFA program I direct at Oregon State University, Cascades. Anytime we can pull back the curtain on those mysterious, unspoken elements of literary culture that keep less experienced writers from entering literary spaces, I believe we should. In particular I loved Camille T. Dungy’s vignette “How to Mingle at a Book Thing” (sage advice!), and I had to chuckle when she wrote “Or try a question that works as a compliment, an opportunity for engagement, and a possible pathway to self-improvement: ‘Nice shoes! Do you remember where you got them?’” Over a decade ago, as a graduate student at the University of Kentucky, I paid this very compliment to Claire Dederer, and we ended up sitting on the floor of the Book Thing with me trying on her shoes! I’ll never forget the fun of it all, and I’ve carried this small literary claim to fame with me ever since.
Jenna Goldsmith
Rockford, Illinois
Thanks to Matthew Sullivan for raising the vital issue of place in fiction in “Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence” (September/October 2025). Sullivan does a fine job exploring it in reference to the real versus the imagined. But I’ll bet he knows how much further it can reach in creating a world. Speculative fiction, for example. In much of Margaret Atwood’s work, action happens in locations of the future. This requires (and allows) the author full mastery, because of course nobody really knows what the future will be like. In my series of novels Resilience: A Trilogy of Climate Chaos and other stories, I often start with a contemporary map. At one point I was working on a story in 2050 with a deep lake and surrounding cliffs. On a drive with a friend from Boston to Canada, we passed a sign with the name of the very lake I had chosen, which I’d never seen. I cried, “You mean we can go there?” We did. It was magical, and as a direct result my description of those cliffs gained power. As climate change urges focus on our future world, place in speculative fiction takes on the vital job of helping us prepare.
Kitty Beer
Cambridge, Massachusetts
In “Logging Off: An Agent’s Perspective on the Social Media Landscape” (July/August 2025), Jade Wong-Baxter insightfully reminds us that “your main job as a writer is to focus on the writing.” As a journalist, I once had thousands of authors follow me on Twitter. Unfortunately I watched many of them shouting into the internet abyss in a desperate attempt to increase their follower count and drive book sales, without ever making a meaningful connection with their audiences. I eventually left social media and my six thousand followers behind. When I recently returned to X, I quickly learned that the noise had only been amplified while I was gone. As writers, we should not be discouraged by the deafening noise on social media that often feels like it is drowning out our work. Instead of worrying about the pressure to build a social media presence, we should try to write something we are proud of that is worth reading and sharing. We should actively go in search of other original voices and amplify them over the cacophony of trivial content that plagues the modern social media landscape. The power of your voice is not determined by the size of your audience but by the impact you have on it. Entertain, inform, inspire, and engage authentically, and your audience will find you.
Michael Aaron Gallagher
Syracuse, New York