Vivian

Dear Valeria,

Fond regards,

Vivian Maier

Philip

Dear Valeria,

And there is another feeling, one which he shares with most of humankind. He knows he’s screwed up his life, or something has twisted it. Every thinking man and woman knows this. Even the smug and dimwitted realize this unconsciously. But a baby, that beautiful being, that unsmirched blank tablet, unformed angel, represents a new hope. Perhaps it won’t screw up. Perhaps it’ll grow up to be a healthy confident reasonable good-humored unselfish loving man or woman. ‘It won't be like me or my next-door neighbor,’ the proud, but apprehensive, parent swears.

Best regards,

Philip José Farmer

Karla

Dear Vale,

“People always say to me
"What do you think you'd like to be
When you grow up?"
And I say, "Why,
I think I'd like to be the sky
Or be a plane or train or mouse
Or maybe a haunted house
Or something furry, rough and wild...
Or maybe I will stay a child.”

your affectionate,

Karla Kuskin

Phyllis

Dear Valeria,

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

...but on the other hand...

Popular literature had been creeping into poetry, fantasy, children's rhymes, song lyrics, and eventually it all got absorbed into my science fiction, and by the end of the seventies (just about the time the great outburst of interest in poetry began to shrink) I stopped being a productive poet simply from lack of poem-shaped ideas. Now my aliens write poems, and I produce them very occasionally. I miss them, but if I tried to force them I'd produce only empty stuff.

Yours sincerely,

Phyllis Gotlieb

James

Dear Valeria,

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.

Best,

J.G. Ballard