To subscribers (i)

from the janitor at Viet Nam Literature Project

We have sent 204 Viet Nam letters since our first on February 9, 2022. They have addressed about 75 works and at least as many authors, also counting editors, publishers, and translators discussed.

We treat each work as literature in the sense of news that stays new. We don’t cover anything I can’t see writing about 1 dozen times. So far we have come back as many as 10 times to more than 40 books.

Every day we post either a new or a previous letter at our Facebook page, after adding a link to posts on the same or related works. We regularly update an index to titles, with the first 2 sentences of each post for illustration.

This month I have published less frequently to give more time to posting each letter more broadly. 3 weeks ago I started sending each new letter to the listserv of the Vietnamese Studies Group (VSG).

The first time, I was looking for 5 more readers for the latest letter on Dawson’s War, the novel from the Special Forces veteran who publishes as B.K. Marshall, to round up securely to the total of 60 readers we recently have regularly achieved. Instead we found 50 more for over 100 total.

The second time I was again looking for 5 more readers and again got 50 more for more than 100 total for Do Hoang Ngoc Anh’s novel, Doi Moi, his new Vietnamese version of his recent English one, Renovation, that we had already written about 10 times.

As I write, our third announcement to VSG has won 130 readers in 2 days for the work of translator Mireille Gansel with poet Xuan Dieu and editor Huu Ngoc on half a dozen poets of the Vietnamese revolution. Of those readers, 3 have joined your ranks as a subscriber.

Half of your number read each new post the morning of its launch, clicking directly from the email we send. I think it is a different half each time, as interests vary. Taken altogether, you provide the base audience for our sense of Viet Nam.

The attention you give our authors is the product of Viet Nam letters, our goal, what I work for. You now number 55, so I can count on 25 in the lecture hall first thing in the morning on the day of publication.

That motivates me, the great gift of your mind. I feel further supported by the 15 paid subscribers whose contributions add up to a noticeable fraction of our total budget for books to write about and my compensation.

Thank you.

The colophon of Viet Nam letters is a thumbnail version of a photograph of me speaking on a Veterans Day with the novelist David A. Willson.