Renovation Journal – Spring 2006
Volume 3 Number 1
Spring 2006
Jeanne Lesinski
I picked Renovation Journal from a shelf of journals because of its theme: “The Letter Issue.” You see, I still feel the presence of my deceased father when I reread the letters he sent to me while I was away at college. I still cherish the love letters my boyfriend sent to me in France before he became my husband. So I expected a great deal from this slender volume. Cornelia Veenendaal’s, “I Must Tell You about a Trip to Zweeloo,” based on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, well portrayed the pre-South of France painter, and editor Kate Hanson’s letter to Franz Wright caught the all-too-familiar timidity when in the presence of celebrity.
I picked Renovation Journal from a shelf of journals because of its theme: “The Letter Issue.” You see, I still feel the presence of my deceased father when I reread the letters he sent to me while I was away at college. I still cherish the love letters my boyfriend sent to me in France before he became my husband. So I expected a great deal from this slender volume. Cornelia Veenendaal’s, “I Must Tell You about a Trip to Zweeloo,” based on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, well portrayed the pre-South of France painter, and editor Kate Hanson’s letter to Franz Wright caught the all-too-familiar timidity when in the presence of celebrity. Felicia Sullvan’s humorous “Dear Landlord Letter” justifiably won the second annual Vinyl Siding Award (I’d like to hear the story behind the naming of this award), and the anonymous quotation “E-mail has killed the letter, and AOL Instant Messenger has pissed on its grave” (Around Town) seems an apt epitaph to the paper letter. I also much appreciate the Thomas Moore quotation about the words of letters speaking “at a different level serving the soul’s organ of rumination rather than the mind’s capacity for understanding.” Yet if this is so, only a few of the letters presented here delve that deeply, one of them being Dave Robinson’s “Letter from a Ruined Desert.” I was nonplussed by the scanned “archival” material—paper notes, e-mail, and “How to Write a Love Letter (according to the Internet)”—and the amount of advertising for Renovation’s online site, subscriptions, and Hanson’s blog.
