8 OCTOBER 2022, NY > VT

Hi Jiksun,

A bottle of Michel Couvreur is a wonderful thing. I still mourn the restaurant in Barcelona that had a house whiskey Couvreur made just for them. I had it once back in 2013, when visiting the city then in what was barely spring. I have regretted never returning there in time for another taste—the restaurant closed in 2017–but perhaps someday in the future when visiting the city someone will surprise me with a bottle, and offer me a glass.

I’m writing to you at this moment from the passenger seat of my car, my husband driving us through the mountains between Troy, NY and Eastern VT, where we live. We began the day in the Catskills. The greatest distance I’ve traveled, a good question: maybe from here to Mars, for my story Down to Mars, about a girl in the near future, newly arrived on Mars, who Instagrams the first Martian cloud before the legalization of the terraforming her parents are engaged in is complete, precipitating an interplanetary crisis.

I don’t usually keep any bureaus near me when I write. I have a few different spaces. At home I have a writing cabin, and I keep a plain wooden desk there with no drawers. I bring anything I’m using in and out in a tote bag. The plain space is an invitation of some kind, important. At Dartmouth College, in my office, I have a Ben Franklin desk I inherited from my dad. It has a few pens, some post its, a checkbook, and a ruler. There’s tremendous clutter around it—my office tends to be something of a ghost of the times I visited before. I like to be there in the off hours, when no one expects me, and so I often get to know the custodial staff, leaving when they come to lock up. There’s something I like about being somewhere hidden or anonymous, like the old Center For Fiction building on East 47th in Manhattan. I wrote The Queen of the Night mostly there, in their writing space on the top floor, which was mostly empty on weekends. It was a townhouse with 6 or 7 floors, and when it was empty, it was perfect, the emptiness like the chime of a bell.

Yours,

Alexander

BIOGRAPHIES

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

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Jiksun Cheung is EIC of The Bureau Dispatch.