Dear Committee Members

Yours on the underfunded wing of the campus,

Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English

Author

Provocateur

October 29, 2009

Janet Matthias … Fitger

Payne University Law School—Admissions

17 Pitlinger Hall

Dear Law School Admissions Committee/Janet:

This letter recommends Vivian Zelles to your esteemed body. Ms. Zelles is an excellent student as will be obvious from her scores and transcripts. She is applying for a residency at Bentham and to Payne’s medical school as well as the law school; whether this diffuse approach indicates a wide range of interests or some sort of chemical imbalance or illness, I haven’t a clue.

I have known Ms. Zelles for approximately nine months. She sat in on my undergraduate workshop last spring—boggling the minds of the younger students with irrelevant theoretical asides—and is currently enrolled in what may be the last graduate-level fiction class ever taught at Payne. (I’m sure you read my screed last month in the campus rag.) Her work is meticulous but not very interesting. Moment of truth: personally, I don’t care for Ms. Zelles, who may be ideally suited to law school. She is obviously brilliant, but I find her off-putting and a bit of a cipher. She has a mind like a bric-a-brac storehouse of facts: a surplus of content put to questionable use.

Janet: Your phone has been going straight to voice mail. Are you out of town? Please call. Eleanor has been stonewalling an advisee I’ve recommended to Bentham, and I wonder if she’s talked to you. Good god, it’s been twenty-two years since the Seminar. Yes, Reg admired my work. Yes, he helped me publish Stain and threw His Royal Weight behind the book. I didn’t ask him to prefer my writing to yours or Troy’s or Eleanor’s or Ken’s or even MTV’s. (Who’d have thunk MTV would marry a vet and turn into a shrink?) But Eleanor is still carving voodoo dolls in my likeness. Are we going to spend the rest of our days in the shadow of H. Reginald Hanf and the Seminar, those few (admittedly powerful) years ever dogging our steps?

Fretfully, your former spouse,

Jay

P.S.: Thank you for not requiring that recommenders submit their letters via an online form. Though technically capable of e-mail, I remain leery, given the fiasco of my “reply all” message in August. (Carole says she is no longer angry, but—given that she requisitioned the coffee machine she bought for my birthday—it appears that her forgiveness is not yet complete.) Call me a Luddite, but I intend to resist for as long as possible the use of robotic fill-in-the-blank quantifiers for the intellectual attributes of human beings.

October 30, 2009

Theodore Boti, CEO

Department of English

Dear Ted,

This letter endorses the work-study application of Gunnar Lang, sophomore, who after months of heroic effort has been duly vetted by the Student Services/Fellowship staff, his one-page résumé grinding its weary way through the system and arriving at last for review in our department with six pounds of red tape clinging to its hem. One wonders which would be more difficult: to secure a minimum-wage job as an English Department undergraduate gofer or to obtain a passport and security clearance through the Middle East. If we give Lang ten hours a week to run errands and let us know when the copier is broken (it is broken at present; perhaps Lang could be persuaded to shave his head and don a monk’s brown sackcloth and work as a scribe), he might have hope of making progress toward his degree.

By the by: I noticed in your departmental plan (I presume I’m the only person who has actually read the plan—you may as well have addressed it to me) that you intend to schedule two faculty meetings this year for the purpose of revising the department constitution. Two quick considerations here, Ted:

1. I wonder, during a time of fiscal, curricular, and architectural crisis, whether our top priority should be the pointless updating of a document no one will read;

2. Fair warning: As a body we tried, in a plenary/horror session when Sarah Lempert was chair, to revise the momentous founding document on which our department depends. We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon, two senior members of the faculty—true, one of them retired and left for rehab that same semester—abandoning the penultimate meeting in tears. (If you’d like to see it, I’ve been keeping a log of department meetings ranked according to level of trauma, with a 1 indicating mild contentiousness, a 3 signifying uncontrolled shouting, and a 5 leading to at least one nervous breakdown and/or immediate referral to the crisis center run by the Office of Mental Health.) I guarantee you: mention the word “constitution” and you’ll have a 911 situation on your hands.

Thinking positively, and at your service as always.

Jay

P.S.: At the upcoming Assembly of Department Chairs meeting I hope you will raise the issue of hires for English and the defunding of our creative writing MA. The idea of graduate writing being defunded because of expense … Ted, faculty in Hutchinson Hall are decorating their million-dollar labs with hadron colliders, while we’re told there’s no money for a functioning chalkboard and a table and chairs. If Donna Lovejoy is up to it (I understand she went home yesterday with a work-related lung infection), you may want to bring her to the meeting with you: she witnessed last year’s auto-da-fé and, given the recent sprinkler system malfunction in her office, will probably bring to the proceedings a sharpened perspective.

November 3, 2009

Anna Huston, Director

Annie’s Nannies Child and Play Center

370 Shadow Pond Way

Cortland, MO 63459

Dear Ms. Huston,

I apologize for the delay in sending this recommendation. For more than two decades I have maintained an orderly record-keeping system regarding each and every one of my students, but I apparently misfiled the information on Shayla Newcome and had to get out the dowsing rod to find her. In response to your query: Ms. Newcome was my student six years ago. Having located the appropriate slim green record book in the lower left drawer of my desk, I note that she received a B in my Intermediate Fiction Writing class, having completed, if I am deciphering my own handwritten notes correctly, a short story intended to be a fictionalization of the pope’s childhood. Whether this indicates that Ms. Newcome is or is not to be entrusted with the precious lives of small children, I have no idea. At least she did not—as many of my undergraduates seem to enjoy doing—submit a vivid and celebratory depiction of murder and mayhem, complete with flesh-eating robots, werewolves, resurrections from the crypt, or some combination of the above. Students’ lives have been cheapened in ways of which they remain blissfully clueless, because of so much TV.

The only other information I can offer you about Ms. Newcome is that during the semester she was enrolled in my class she was having a difficult time. Students don’t generally confide in me regarding their personal crises (I am not known for being particularly approachable or cuddly), but Ms. Newcome did, and I remember that in the interstices of our conversation she chewed at the lime-green polish—an unfortunate color—on her fingernails. A few weeks later I asked if her situation had improved and she said it had not, but she was “learning to accommodate.” I found that impressive, and remembering Ms. Newcome now—though my file drawer contains thousands of lives

for which I often find myself feeling accountable—I realize I am well disposed in her favor; in fact, I thoroughly urge you to offer her a job.

Why? Because, as a student of literature and creative writing, Ms. Newcome honed crucial traits that will be of use to you: imagination, patience, resourcefulness, and empathy. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

I believe Ms. Newcome eminently capable of the work for which she has applied.

With good wishes for your tiny charges,

Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English

Payne University

November 6, 2009

Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Lefferts Hall

Attention: Associate VP Samuel Millhouse

Dear Associate Vice Provost Millhouse,

The purpose of this letter is to bolster the promotion and tenure case of Professor Martina Ali here at our esteemed institution of higher learning. I am not a member of Professor Ali’s Film Studies Program, but the Honorable Pooh-Bahs in your office have decreed that P&T dossiers be encumbered with no fewer than six missives of support, and Professor Ali is one of only three faculty members in her own modest department. Such is the wisdom that prevails at Payne.

I’ll get around to my evaluation of Professor Ali. But I have a few other things on my mind also, and it would be foolish of me, I think—it would be remiss—if I didn’t take this opportunity to address a few of them. After all, how often does a lowly professor of creative writing and English have the ear of the associate VP? Perhaps I should intercalate my own laundry list of items throughout my evaluation of Martina—she does stellar research—threading them into the fabric of this letter like stinging nettles. We’ll see how things go.

First—Professor Ali’s monograph on warfare in European film: While some members of her discipline have adopted an almost psychedelic approach to their choice of material, delivering conference papers and fashioning entire semester-long courses on the topic of toothpaste commercials or videos of tumbleweeds bounding along by the side of a road,

Professor Ali is invested in significance. Her work combines rigorous historical research, film scholarship, and psychoanalytic theory—and her goal is enlightenment, not obfuscation. She has justifiably won the Longfreth Prize (twice!), the panel of judges likening her scholarship to the work of Alperovitz and Harms, pioneers in the field.

Ali is publishing in some of her discipline’s top venues. Comparative Film and Culture in particular—a highly selective, peer-reviewed journal—is a scholarly coup.