Louise T. Guinther

It’s fun to get a letter to the editor published in The New York Times. If you’re a writer, it’s fun to get published anywhere, even if you don’t get paid. In the case of the Times letters section, it’s particularly fun, as an insignificant private citizen, to have your own little dig at a big, important issue or an outsize personality read by … well, lots and lots of people. (I have no idea how many readers the Times letters section actually has.)

What is most fun about being published in the Times, though, is the usually invisible spiderweb of connections it brings to light. The first time I was published in the Times, I got a letter several days later, by snail mail, from an old college buddy of my mother’s, living in Chicago, from whom we had heard nothing apart from Christmas cards for many years. I had always admired her, and I loved knowing her political views jibed with mine. A closer friend used to call me up regularly when he read one of my letters and tell me that he knew it was mine without checking the byline because of the way it was written and how heartily he agreed with it. (If you are lucky enough to have any friends like that, hold on to them!) Yet another old pal, an expatriate, once messaged me on Facebook to compliment me on a letter he had seen halfway around the world.

This time, the first e-mail in my box this morning was from my favorite college professor, the composer Richard Wilson, who almost always notices my letters and sends me a nice note about them. I love this brief but somehow meaningful way of reconnecting with all sorts of people from my life, past and present. It makes my world feel richer somehow.

And I confess, I also feel honored to know so many people who are thorough readers of the newspaper of record. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.