[Alyson Kuhn] At 7 am yesterday {September 1}, Tom Llewellyn launched his newest project: a book via blog. Letter Off Dead is a correspondence between a boy starting junior high school and his dad, who is dead. Tom is a copywriter, creative director and corporate lackey by day and the “writer half” of Beautiful Angle, an amazing on-going letterpress poster project he started in 2002 with his friend and colleague designer Lance Kagey.
Tom is also an aspiring writer of adolescent novels. He comments, “The book publication process is so long – I have a deal in the works, but I’ve thought about trying to do a blog that gets an immediate connection with the audience. That’s what’s so great about Beautiful Angle. There’s no middleman, no delay. It democratizes the process.”
“Trevor, the letter-writing 12-year-old, is autobiographical. His father died when he was five, as my own father did. My first year of junior high was the toughest time in my life. I think kids of this age long for honesty, for honest feedback. For Trevor, these letters are an outlet where he can honestly express his feelings and observations. He can also explore his ideas about an afterlife.”
“So, this is a serialized writing experiment. I haven’t written too far in advance. The correspondence will need daily-ish entries for it to work.” Trevor’s father will start writing back in a couple of weeks, and there will be occasional visuals – from the characters, not from Tom.
More than 600 of Tom’s friends and fans have accepted his e-vitation to “start eavesdropping on a different conversation.” I loved the first two posts.
Alyson Kuhn, the editor of Felt & Wire, proclaims epistolary the adjective of our day.
