Editor's Note

On behalf of the staff of Ninth Letter I offer sincere thanks to all the friends, readers, and contributors who have offered help and support, in ways financial and otherwise, over the past seven years. Special thanks to the individuals and organizations listed below, and also to the following supporters: Patrick Lane, Mary Morris, Steven Malk, W. Michael Garner, Sander Postol, Amy Sayre-Roberts, Lynn DeFries, Larry Anderson, Susan Fink, and Harmony Neal. Ninth Letter could not continue to exist without you!

—JS

Support at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

College of Fine and Applied Arts
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of English
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
LAS Humanities Council
Office of the Chancellor
Office of the Provost
School of Art and Design

Individual Sponsors

Publisher
Kai and Baron Haber
Robert and Kay Merrick
Richard Powers
Robert Skiba

Patron
Melvin A. Skvarla

Friend
Raina Bahns
Joan Golder
Robert Graves
Lee Gurga
Kathleen Harleman
Janice N. Harrington and Robert Dale Parker
Keri Kaeding and Steve Danzer
Audrey Niffenegger
Kai Pham

This project is partially supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council.

Information about supporting Ninth Letter can be found at www.ninthletter.com; all donations and gifts to Ninth Letter are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Art Director’s Note

If you've made it this far into this issue of Ninth Letter, you've already participated in a moment in its design story that cannot be re-created. We tend to think of printed material as dead--fixed in time--but its permanence is an illusion. To be in the physical world is to decay, to change, and to move.

By unwrapping the contents of this issue, you have dislodged the original cover design and set into motion an unpacking of parts that together create a kind of landscape within which the stories, essays, and poems can situate themselves. Neither literal illustration nor wild tangent, the supplements are the results of how our team of designers has further elaborated on the themes, motifs, and subject matter about which the authors in this issue have written.

If you find that eventually the loose pieces have snuck off, and all you're left with is a bound book filled with not much more than page after page of words, well then you've arrived at the point.

Perhaps an anecdote here will better suffice: Over the past year, I've been working on a writing project, which often meant hours of staring at an empty page inside that infamous word processing program, waiting anxiously for the words to come. Hour after hour of burning that interface into my retinas proved to be too cruel a way to do serious writing, so I launched a search for something better. Something less...brute. I somehow stumbled on a program called Omm Writer (available for free at ommwriter.com). The web site calls it "a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again." Hey, that's what I want!

When the program launches, the interface looks like an abridged versio of the cacophony of tool palettes and menu bars found in a typical word processing program. You are faced with a gray field that takes over your entire computer screen. There is a dotted line that indicates the writing area, and six black buttons that comprise six basic menus (typeface, type size, background color, ambient sound selection, keystroke sound selection, and file menu). At first, admittedly, the entire package, with its sound effects and Zen mentality, felt a little too much like a new age self help book. Am I really writing this serious essay in a program that plays nature sounds while I type? I almost closed it right away and forced myself back to that other word processing program--until all of a sudden the Omm Writer did something that made me stop cold.

The whole interface dissolved.

You see, when you sit still and stare at Omm Writer, waiting for the words to come, everything that doesn't have to do with the actual act of writing (tool palettes, formatting option, the notion of a "page," etc.) slowly fades away. You are left with emptiness in all directions, without the digital representation of a letter-sized sheet of paper, without a thousand different decisions to make about how your words will look. Writing, here, seems like my ideas have many more possibilities, as if my words might be more exotic--more lovely, even--floating around in this boundless, effortless, beautifully empty space. The cursor blinks at me and I stare back at the visual audacity of simple black words on a white field.

This is all you need. This is all you need...

--JVL