“Let us hear about your progress”: Letters Between Lucia Berlin, Edward Dorn, & Jennifer Dunbar Dorn
“Let us hear about your progress”: Letters Between Lucia Berlin, Edward Dorn, & Jennifer Dunbar Dorn
$10.00
Editor: Megan Paslawski
43 pp, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
ISBN: 978-1-7339317-7-9
“Let Us Hear About Your Progress” collects correspondence between Lucia Berlin, Edward Dorn, and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn from the years between 1976 and 1989. The letters capture the significance of their friendship and record Berlin’s progress as a writer whose beautiful, funny, and offbeat voice inimitably captured the difficult territory that drew her. They also demonstrate how, in contrast to the “chopped up” experiences Berlin had with other publishers, Dorn and Dunbar Dorn used their newspapers and their connections to make spaces for Berlin’s stories that preserved her vision. While detailing Berlin’s emergence as a published writer of short stories, these letters offer a closer glimpse of Dorn as a professor and literary mentor while underscoring the significance of Dunbar Dorn’s editorial work during these years.
Authors’ Biography
Lucia Berlin’s writing drew on the astonishing scope of her experiences, which left her equally at home on private jets and city buses and took her across the American West, from coast to coast, and abroad. During her lifetime, her short story collections from Black Sparrow, Poltroon, and Turtle Island Presses drew the admiration of her peers and fellow writers, and she won an American Book Award with 1990’s Homesick. She held the position of Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where her student Jenny Shank described her as a professor who taught her mentees “to value ourselves as writers and to appreciate other writers, regardless of whether, what, or where they had published.” Her acclaimed posthumous collections from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015) and Evening in Paradise(2018), recently introduced her writing to new audiences.
Edward Dorn was a graduate of the experimental Black Mountain College, where under Charles Olson’s tutelage he began a study of the American West that would feed a literary career of innovative depth and variety. The author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translation, his best-known work remains the epic poem Gunslinger with its inventive wanderers’ diction. Dorn held academic posts that took him to the University of Idaho, the University of Essex as a Fulbright Scholar, Northeastern Illinois University, and Kent State University before he accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he directed the creative writing program. He and his wife Jennifer Dunbar Dorn collaborated on a number of literary projects that included their newspaper Rolling Stock, which they published throughout the 1980s. Dorn continued teaching at Boulder until his death in the December of 1999.
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn is a poet, an editor, a filmmaker, and a biographer among her many creative commitments. Born in Moscow, she grew up in London where she attended the London Film School before studying Russian and then American Literature at the University of Essex. There she met the American poet Edward Dorn and in 1968 moved with him to the US. Their marriage of over thirty years produced collaborations on many projects, including the literary newspaper Rolling Stock throughout the 1980s. She also edited his posthumous collections Chemo Sábe (2001) and Collected Poems (Carcanet 2012). She taught writing and film at the University of Colorado, where she also edited the magazines Sniper Logic and Square One. Her poetry publications include 1975’s Manchester Square (with Ed Dorn), Galactic Runaway (2007) and Eastward Ho (2015).
Editor
Megan Paslawski
Lost & Found Faculty Editor
Megan Paslawski previous editorial work with Lost & Found includes “like a great armful of wild & wonderful flowers”: Selected Letters of Michael Rumaker and Rumaker’s memoir Robert Duncan in San Francisco, which she co-edited with Ammiel Alcalay for City Lights/Lost & Found Elsewhere. Recent short stories appear in or are forthcoming from Tampa Review, CALYX Journal,Pembroke Magazine, The Texas Review, and Blue Earth Review. Her writing has received support from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and she is very grateful to the Center for the Humanities for making her archival research for Lost & Found possible.
