3-12-13 RMB Endless Prairie

Dear Rita Mae Brown,

I started reading Songs to a Handsome Woman. I am enjoying it and wondering if you still write poetry. There are poetic phrases in your work, so maybe that is where your poetry lives now.

“The Sun in January” is one of my favorites so far. In eighteen words you convey emotion, transition, a relationship, landscape of soul and earth, action and drama. Can I quote the whole poem? It is so brief, but I don’t want to infringe. I will just encourage others to find it on their own. It is worth the search.

This book seems so clearly about love, its journey, yet even in the “To the Reader” preface you end with “a society or individual who denies love is a step away from denying life.”

The individual… the self, whether it be yourself, ourselves, or a character’s self is so closely linked to the whole, society, community… in your work. The strength of that connection is a distinctive marker of Rita Mae Brown.

Others write about love and become engrossed in their own emotion, enraptured by their own passion. A young Rita Mae Brown writes about love and discusses society, an “endless prairie” and the Statue of Liberty.

How can one person see so much and so many people see so little?

Adelante,

Loraine