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Dead Letters [1]

Fiction [2]
2.23.22

Angel Dominguez’s Desgraciado (the collected letters), published in February by Nightboat Books, comprises a series of letters addressed to Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Mayan language in Maní Yucatán in the sixteenth century. This hybrid epistolary collection [3] navigates the shared trauma and history of colonization while creating an intimate correspondence that returns agency to the descendant of a people de Landa tried to extinguish. “Dear Diego, I write to you because there’s nothing else to do; nothing to be done, and yet we must go on. Go on living, go on writing,” Dominguez writes. Draft a story in which a character corresponds with a figure from history. Whether through letters, dreams, or ghostly visitations, what would your protagonist ask this historical figure, and what would drive this quest for answers?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/dead_letters_0

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/dead_letters_0 [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/fiction [3] https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_angel_dominguez