Ben Greenman: Killing E-mail One Postcard at a Time

Ben Greenman wants you to write.

A postcard. Not an e-mail.

E-mail is the enemy. E-mails are “nasty, soul-killing things,” he says. We have to make peace with them; they’re not going away. But Greenman isn’t willing to give up traditional written forms to reach an armistice.

The prolific Brooklyn-based writer’s new book, Correspondences (Nov. 2008, Hotel St. George Press), rises from the tension Greenman feels between traditional publishing forms and the speed-of-light electronic communication that threatens their relevance … and maybe existence.

“I sort of depend on a middle ground,” Greenman says. “On the one hand, we now have more places to write, to be seen as a writer, and that’s better than ever. At the same time, I’ve always collected books, and I love having and holding them; I worry that this experience will be gone as things become more and more electronic.”

Greenman has produced critically acclaimed works like Superbad (2001), later remixed as Superworse (2004), and A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love (2007). He supplements his day job at the New Yorker, where he’s an editor, with contributions to McSweeney’s, Moistworks and other noteworthy publications. His essays and collections seltzer wit, oddity and invention; they’ve made the Chicago-born, Miami-raised, 39-year-year-old wordsmith a standard reference for writers coming of age in our unsettled new century.

Greenman has a traditional book coming next April - Please Step Back, (Melville House). But possibly as an antidote to tradition, Correspondences is an experimental book, an interactive “secret society thing” that he hopes will encourage readers into at least a few precious moments of reliance on good old-fashioned pen and ink.

Correspondences is an art book - make that an artwork book. It comprises seven stories, these handpress-printed on fine handmade paper, with six of the stories accordioned, two by two, into three folded book sections. A seventh story is printed on the actual casing of the book. This seventh story is interactive; it’s the Postcard Project.

The project invites readers to fill in, by handwritten postcard, intentional blanks Greenman leaves in this seventh story. It’s a tale of betrayal: A man leaves his home to reflect on the staleness of his marriage. He meets a young woman. Something happens…and readers can fill in the fiction by contributing as many as nine postcards written by and to characters in the story.

Greenman says the Postcard Project is a challenge to conventional, close-minded thinking about writing, about who’s a writer. He wants to invite more people to the traditional form, and, at least for a moment, away from e-mail.

“I’m really interested in getting postcards from people who aren’t writers, to try to draw people into it,” Greenman says. “I want to blow out the idea of what authorship is.”

Greenman, a sometime Paste contributor, has produced critically acclaimed works like Superbad (2001), later remixed as Superworse (2004), and A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love (2007).