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Digital On Demand - Leslie Downie

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20 pages

English

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A propos
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Extrait

Description

Leslie dumps her legal career to write to 10 men of letters, ranging from a war journalist to a nanotechnology guru, legal beagles, sportsmen and a comedian. Their responses to her are a roller-coaster read, followed by Leslie’s Guide for Writing to Men which explains how you can initiate your own letter writing group. Each writer describes how he felt about being approached by a woman to be part of Men of Letters, followed by practical advice and templates for starting your own group with a view to self-publishing.

Sujets

Personal Memoirs

Biography

Autobiography

Informations

Publié par	Digital On Demand
Date de parution	18 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780639727103
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	38 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Men of Letters
Glenn Caithness
Ian Downie
Graham Giles
Joel Greenberg
Craig Hepburn
Charl Hugo
Marc Leistner
Mark Miles
Mark Peters
Mervyn Stutter
from
Leslie Downie
to you

Originally published by L Downie in 2022
Somerset West, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa
write@downieconsult.co.za
Print copy ISBN 978-0-6397-2709-7
E-book ISBN 978-0-6397-2710-3

© Leslie Downie (2022)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system whatsoever without written permission from Leslie Downie, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Provided that the authors of each of the letters in this book may make use of their own writing in their own letters without such permission.

It is one of the blessings of old friends
that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contents

Foreword
Part A: THE MEN’S LETTERS
1 Mark Peters
2 Marc Leistner
3 Joel Greenberg
4 Charl Hugo
5 Mark Miles
6 Ian Downie
7 Craig Hepburn
8 Graham Giles
9 Glenn Caithness
10 Mervyn Stutter
Part B: LESLIE’S WRITING GUIDE
1 How to start writing
2 Templates
3 Accepting rejection
4 How the writers felt
5 Cheers

Foreword

Cape of Good Hope
1 November 2022
Dear Reader,
Lawyers are called solicitors for a reason. They are trained to solicit, and that is exactly how I persuaded my men of letters to participate in this volume. Twisting ten men’s arms to write to me in a personal way has raised some eyebrows. The default inference is that women with that sort of intention aren’t trimming their sails to head towards men’s minds, but rather in the direction of the saucier side of solicitation. Most social taboos are re-assessed periodically to consider whether they are still useful, but prohibitions around close heterosexual friendships are seldom challenged. If you enjoy subverting censorship based on gendered stereotypes you should enjoy the second part of the book . It explains how you can initiate your own letter writing group, with each writer describing how he felt about being approached by a woman to be part of this one.
Authentic communication is much easier when you have time to order your thoughts and develop a theme. An email is to a letter what a wildebeest is to a buffalo: a pale mimicry of something far more powerful. A renaissance of letter writing is long overdue, particularly after this distanced Covid era, when connecting with friends is recognised as central to wellbeing. I didn’t choose the men in this volume because they are famous or infamous, although one or two of them are. I chose them because they are friends (from the past or present) that I find really interesting. After thinking through potential writers, including some family, I first thought I would aim for a multicultural group of writers, but then decided to leave this for a second volume of letters, and to rather start with the letters of nine White men who grew up under apartheid.
I enjoy the coming-of-age genre of writing, particularly if it has a historical bent, and I felt it would be interesting for readers to see how the lives and thinking of White men whose formative years were conditioned by apartheid have moved on. I deliberately chose friends from very different backgrounds with contrasting life experiences to avoid the kind of stereotyping that has become so common in South Africa. While they do touch upon the grand themes of Covid like mortality, corruption, war and racial or other inequality, there’s a soupçon of everything; autobiography, humour, military history, recipes, feminism, poetry, sport, science... The writer of the tenth set of letters is related to South Africa only by marriage, but I couldn’t resist having a stand-up comedian make the final curtain call.
The world and South Africa are in a dire situation, so most of us chose to write about topics that kept us upbeat and thinking resiliently. My memory map is now delightfully populated with funny, profound or thought-provoking vignettes: Mark Peters the war photo-journalist reflecting on how to attach freedom to his life; Joel Greenberg the baby boomer looking in the mirror and asking the real Joel to please stand up; Mervyn Stutter’s comedic Priapric Kevin with his hormone throbbing ardour; Graham Giles the legal beagle’s cautionary court room tales; Charl Hugo the law professor’s moving poem on the loss of a close mutual friend; Ian Downie the risk management specialist and Escoffier Disciple joyfully connecting through cuisine; Craig Hepburn the social entrepreneur’s passionate defence of the beautiful game; Glenn Caithness the teenage boy-next-door agonising over his girlfriends; Marc Leistner the former EU banker’s profundities on communication; and last – but not least – Mark Miles the all-rounder enthusiastically looking though Alice’s teeny, tiny looking glass at the delights of nanotechnology.
Being one woman against 10 men I couldn’t resist the urge to press a few gender justice buttons. I have needled men in this way for years in search of the particular points at which pressure can be applied to bring about healing. So, in the interest of a non-partisan spirit, I will now poise my needle to pierce a few of my female readers. Suppression of heterosexual friendships is enforced mainly by the fairer sex, with more women than men looking askance at the crossing of this line in their social circle. Not being the covert or unfaithful type myself I struggle with the mindset that it is bad manners to find the ideas of another woman’s ‘significant other’ totally absorbing. Or indeed that it is indelicate to show a single man that you find him fascinating, unless you intend to flirt with him. While I do have many male friends, these archaic assumptions closed the door on quite a few friendships that would have greatly enriched my life, had they been ‘permitted’.
I value my female friends who have close male friends, but they are definitely in the minority. So I have a question for women who don’t fall into this category: Why do so many of you have a male friend from the past who you miss, that you would like to communicate with, but don’t? Are we all children that platonic emotional attachment is so feared? Neanderthal notions of men seeing women as property, to be held separately from other men, lurk behind these attitudes. Ladies if you make the insulting assumption that all women can’t be trusted with men you are letting the sisterhood down. Of course there are black widow spiders out there, but inasmuch as you give every woman you know such labels (irrespective of their character), you are labelling yourself in the same way.
It’s time for men and women to renegotiate the rules around heterosexual friendships. Letters are a very good place to start. If you feel the need to keep one foot on the floor to show you are chaste, letters intended for publication are likely to work for you. At the end of the book Leslie’s G uide for writing to men (or women) explains how you can use my templates and blame the idea on me when approaching the opposite sex to write. Real friendship between grownup men and women outside of the workplace may well be the golden key to women’s lib. It’s over to you now to open this door for yourself and for our children.

Warm regards,
Leslie
Part A: THE MEN’S LETTERS
1 Mark Peters

About Mark

I am an international motivational speaker, raconteur, war journalist and photographer based in Cape Town. I worked for the Johannesburg Star, the New York Times , LA Times , London Sunday Times , Chicago Tribune and finally Newsweek Magazine . I covered numerous wars, from Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) to Afghanistan, and I have been sentenced to death three times in the line of my work.
(See www.markberrypeters.com)

Cape of Good Hope
28 October 2021
Dear Mark,
This is intimidating, what do I pitch first? The death threats you outfaced as a photo journalist in hotspots all over the world? Your iconic Newsweek cover photograph of Mandela coming out of prison after 27 years? Or Mark the debonaire ladies’ man, with your paradoxical devil-may-care chivalrous persona? Or maybe the you who slept rough as a bergie on Table Mountain to survive your life, versus the you who enjoyed a life of leisure as a gentleman wine farmer? I haven’t felt daunted about writing to the other men of letters so far. While the quality of my own writing strikes fear in my heart (whether it’s boring or hitting the wrong note) how to choose a subject for my opening letter to the others has always been easy. You have so many faces Mark, and all of them equally fascinating. Which to choose?
Hmm. I think my first choice for subject would actually have to be your physical face, which is so absolutely the face of someone who has lived those experiences. Your face reads like the quintessential map of an extremely hard life spent peering into a terrifying abyss, with just enough balance not to fall in, to be able to reveal to others that the abyss really does exist. I would love to put that map somewhere in this book, so please would you think about someone taking that iconic photo. What do you think?
I know you shun taking photos these days – even with your phone – but why let a lifetime of superlative skills go to waste? You could be the backseat driver and choose the location and composition. Ian strikes me as a good contender to take the shot, after a few glasses around his fire pit. Like you, he’s a man of many hidden parts, and his photos are as good as you get for an amateur. Who better than Ian to wine and dine you into the split seconds necessary to capture the essence of your unbelievably unusual soul off guard?
My first choic