Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

What, after all, is a writer’s life without a dose of despair?

I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to “the writing life,” which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all.

Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved as many foundering souls as a belief in god.

Mr. White is not yet a candle ready to illuminate anyone else’s darkness, but he understands that the darkness exists, and he does not turn away.

The worst fate some undergrads can imagine for themselves: full employment, a home, a spouse and kids, a car.

You and I are both in the business of believing in, and promoting, things that don’t yet exist. The leap of faith: it’s equal parts wishful thinking, vicarious ambition, and bullshit, and yet … I can already envision the moment when I open Troy’s new book and find within it, among the acknowledgments, your name and mine; and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us—some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again.