| Corresponding Feelings
In our fast-paced, modern times, with communication dominated by E-mail, fax machines, voice mail, and cellular phones, it's good now and then to recall the virtues and benefits of old-fashioned letter writing. In letters we're revealed to ourselves and to the recipient. We reflect and ponder. We remember. Our conversation is slowed and one-sided as we wait for a response to a letter. And a letter isn't merely to communicate pertinent information, but to correspond: it can be intimate and revealing, touching and profound.
Norma Lundholm Djerassi's new book, Heart Notes-A Mingle-Mangle, is a collection of letters written to important people in her life-but people who are no longer here to read her letters or to share her life-and it reminds us of the beauties and benefits of letter writing.
In Heart Notes, the author uses letters to reflect upon events, people, and memories. The letters record and remember personal history, those things that mold a person's inner life. The recipient is the reader and not the addressed, though that person is revealed as we view him or her through the memory of the writer. And Norma Lundholm Djerassi reveals herself with candor and courage as she delves into these remembrances to flush out their emotional truths.
In many ways Heart Notes is about the subject of death-a topic many of us attempt to avoid, though the pain of losing loved ones is a fact we all must reckon with. Heart Notes reminds us of the resilience and breadth of the human spirit: while experiencing loss that marks a life forever, our capacity for joy can still remain.
With wisdom, candor and deep feeling, Norma Lundholm Djerassi sends her revealing missives off into the world, to be read but not answered or returned-at least not in the traditional way.
Norma Lundholm Djerassi is retired from a career as a teacher of English and English as a Second Language. She received her B.A. degree from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. from Boston University. She is a mother and a grandmother, and has always been a writer of letters and poetry. She is also the author of Glimpses of China from a Galloping Horse (Pergamon Press, 1974) and a collection of poetry, The Gentle Cry (Greenwood Press, 1971), and her poems have been published in several reviews and anthologies. She lives and writes in Portola Valley, California.. |
