In the mail today a copy of Readers Digest arrived containing a cheque and a story of mine published ten years ago and collected in 2007 in an anthology called Body Breakdown. The original story appeared on www.openletters.net, the epistolary venture undertaken by Paul Tough after his tenure as editor of Saturday Night, the general interest magazine of some renown that Conrad Black buried a few years later. Open Letters published a new letter every week for six months, and displayed them with an epistolary flourish in monospaced courier type, which reminded us in 2000, of the not-yet-so-lost-age of writing with typewriters.
Paul Tough has since worked as an editor at New York Times Magazine and Harpers. He has kept Open Letters alive for readers, who can find it at www.openletters.net.
My Body Breakdown story in its original form can be found on Open Letters under the title on getting sick, and well. Along with another story that I think is more successful, called on stigmata. Readers Digest claims to connect to 9 million Canadians. To appear in its pages is surely to arrive (somewhere)!
