Chair, Committee on Creative Writing
Department of English
Standard State University
Dear Committee Members:
Please consider Professor Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members as required
reading for all students beginning your creative writing program. It’s true
that the book doesn’t break new ground – satirizing English departments is like
shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka. Many have tried and few have failed. Nor
is it the sharpest, most biting such satire, John L’Heureux’s Handmaid of Desire easily wins that prize.
And it probably isn’t funnier than Richard Russo’s Straight Man or Jane Smiley’s Moo
(which satirizes an entire university).
But Dear Committee
Members is still a brilliant achievement
which delights readers even as it offers lessons for writers. I wouldn’t have thought
the simple stratagem of the letter of recommendation could sustain an entire
book, but Schumacher manages without discernible effort. Talent can make any
format work.
Moreover, and I won’t say more to avoid spoiling the reader’s
pleasure, the author accomplishes a change in emotional atmosphere across the
pages with the smooth subtlety of morning sun dissolving maritime fog. Anyone
who wants to learn to write should carefully study what she has accomplished
here.
Best wishes and don’t let your students’ mutant human-bedbug
creatures bite.
Garrison Walters
Author of the Aldus Stewart thrillers: Killing
Justice and A Riddle (as well as
another novel which shall not be named – we all have to learn)
