Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please e-mail [email protected] 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
Words cannot express the gratitude I feel to David W. Berner and to Poets & Writers Magazine for drawing attention to the novella as a “legit” literary form (“More Is Less, More or Less: The Novella as a Legit Literary Form,” July/August 2026). Berner’s eloquent presentation of the novella’s elements and qualities offers anybody who is writing in this form, or considering it, an invaluable working guide. I’ve written three novellas but have often hesitated to use the word novella when talking about my writing, either because the term is unfamiliar or because of the form’s “orphan” status. Reading in this magazine about the novella’s long tradition and the growing number of presses that are committing to publishing novellas, I feel inspired to keep writing in this compelling genre.
Molly Vaux
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
In the In Memoriam section of the July/August 2026 issue, I saw that Tracy Kidder had passed away. This saddened me because reading Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, 1981) is why I moved from New York to California to work as a computer programmer. (Why not? COBOL is just writing in a different language.) It was a compelling story that captured the excitement of the coming Computer Age. There is one line in the book that has stayed with me all these years, and it resonated even more once I retired. Stated by one of the developers trying to build a machine that works in billionths of a second via a note on his terminal: “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” RIP, Tracy Kidder.
Meg Keehan
Healdsburg, California
The AI safeguards highlighted in the Editor’s Note (“The Ghost in the Machine Sleeps Tonight” by Kevin Larimer, July/August 2026) are understandable, but they raise a more fundamental question of what happens when highly literate, accomplished, and experienced readers, editors, and writers are challenged to distinguish between an AI-written work and one written by a human. Haven’t we already crossed a threshold when distinguished publications like Granta publish and reward works likely created at least partly by AI? Even the nation’s most prestigious MFA creative writing programs are confronting an unsettling truth as many professors are admitting they can no longer confidently distinguish between a human-written poem or short story and one generated by AI. Artificial intelligence is only in its incipience and will likely get exponentially better. The debate and discussion will soon move from one about technology to something more philosophical. Is art defined and judged by who created it or only by how deeply it moves us?
John Szabo
Newport Beach, California
Thanks to Alisha Fernandez Miranda for the advice on all the writer scams out there (“Me vs. the Machines: How to Spot a Phishing Scheme,” May/June 2026). I thought I’d seen them all when I got not one but three, supposedly from Hachette Publishing Group. I ignored the first, but the second said I should have an agent and proceeded to give me the name of one, about whom I did a check online, and she looked very legit. So I took a chance and wrote to the agent, and she asked for a publishing package so she could promote me. Then I got another publishing company writing to me—this one had an editor whose e-mail was misspelled, and even her name in her closing was wrong. Okay, time for more research. I went to the website of the second publisher, and it had a fraud statement there…. Yes, sadly I was taken in, at first. And it really is sad, as Fernandez Miranda writes, because our lives are hard enough. My skeptical nature is running at such a high volume now that I’m afraid even a legit agent will not get through. Thanks, Alisha Fernandez Miranda—we do have to keep letting writers know. And I’m not new at this, I have twenty books published, but [the scammers] are getting cleverer every day. Stay diligent, shame them if you can, ask them questions they can’t answer. Maybe someday they’ll think we’re too smart for them.
Monette Bebow-Reinhard
Green Bay, Wisconsin