As I’ve probably mentioned, I’m currently writing a paper on Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren and am reaching that obsession phase with the book. So I had high levels of excitement over this letter from Samuel Delany to magazine publisher Kirpatrick Sale who had previously written Delany to express his (and Thomas Pynchon’s!) excitement over Delany’s writing. In the letter, which according to accounts by Delany, would have been written just six months after he started the 800 pg behemoth that is Dhalgren, we get a hint of how his writing process took place: in “various notebooks, napkins, and envelopes.” I’m attached to this detail in the letter because it mirrors the writing process of the main character, a poet, in Dhalgren itself.