Dear Samantha Hunt: An Open Letter

Write or Die Magazine published my essay “Dear Samantha Hunt: An Open Letter,” on synchronicities, ghost books, dead fathers, and the connections we feel as authors between one another.

Excerpt 1

“There’s a word for what you describe about devouring other people’s texts and making them our own, about how we forget what we’ve remembered. You probably know this word, but just in case you don’t, I’ll leave it here for you because it’s beautiful: cryptomnesia. It’s a compound of the Greek cryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) and mnesia (memory). Some authors have unintentionally committed plagiarism because they’d forgotten where their ideas originally came from. Who stands near the ink gets black, says classical Chinese wisdom, says Anne Carson in Plainwater.”

Excerpt 2

“Recently in Rome, I roamed the modest Pietro Canonica Museum on the immodest Villa Borghese grounds. Not yet knowing who he was, I had admired one of his sculptures a few weeks before in one of those wealthy Italian palaces, Il Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and was delighted to discover he had his own museum built around his former workshop. Among the massive statues of tsars and busts of polished princesses was one unassuming sculpture of Icarus, half a wing attached to his shoulder. Thinking of your father’s manuscript about flying, I approached, wanting to snap a picture for you. Only then did I notice the sculpture was a model for the real thing Pietro Canonica never made. A ghost sculpture is the more physical cousin of our ghost books in the world. “