FAN MAIL

Several weeks have passed since I first tried to email a fan letter to Elizabeth Ellis. It is not something I normally do, sending fan mail. People worthy of fan mail get a lot of it, I hear. I hate the thought of taking up their time having to reply to me. But I had made a New Year’s resolution to contact people who wouldn’t expect to hear from me. I had not been thinking of contacting people I have never met. Still I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should make an exception in this case.

Elizabeth Ellis is a Texas storyteller, one who turns pain into laughter, just my cup of tea. David discovered her at a conference in 2004. I didn’t hear her tell a story until last fall when we went to the Jonesboro Festival. Once she got on to my radar, I followed her shamelessly from tent to tent for the whole week end, listening with all my senses to a huge repertoire of stories, short, medium and long. She never knew I was there. In tents that hold more than a thousand people you don’t exactly notice every stranger.

You can influence someone and never know you had. After that weekend I would imagine her pitch and rhythm, matching my voice to hers every time I stood before an audience to start a story. I thought of all the plants that draw sustenance by attaching themselves to living trees. It seemed unethical that she should have a parasite and not know it.

So I went to her website and launched a fan letter into cyberspace. It was returned. Undeliverable mail,” is what the message said. I patted myself on the back for trying, and settled down to live my life. But in the quiet moments when my mind wandered, it wandered back to that undelivered letter and tried to make improvements.

I went back to her website and tried again. The machinations of cyberspace are always unpredictable. But the second letter came back, same as the first. I vowed to definitely get on with my life.

It didn’t work. More revisions came into my head when I was trying to compose a grocery list. So I returned to that website, passed through the main page, and into the murky interior where I pressed another button and got a different email address. That one worked. She got my letter. She was pleased. She wrote back to me the very next day. She said she hardly ever gets fan mail.