Recently I had the great honor of seeing Phyllis Reynolds Naylor receive the Maryland Author Award. Naylor, the winner of the Edgar Award and Newbery medal was a highly deserving winner.
Her acceptance speech was food for thought. She talked about some of the letters she’d received from young readers, particularly young readers of the Alice series of books. Much of the correspondence is available on Alice’s blog.
As I, and others, have mentioned, the easy availablity of authors in the virtual world, via websites, Facebook pages and Twitter have changed the nature of the author/reader relationship immensely. I was a voracious reader as a teen, but I never would have imagined writing Judy Blume about my real life problems. She was just as fictional to me as the characters she created.
But Naylor talked about real continuous correspondence she had with a few regular readers, and I can only imagine she is not at all alone in this.
What a wonderful connection! Are there others out there, readers and authors, who have had such a close correspondence with someone who touched them in their writing, whether it’s the writing of the novel, or the writing of the letter?