Read Like the Wind: Bill Cunningham’s Photos and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Life

Dear readers,

My first experience with writing a fan letter didn’t go well. It was to the children’s writer and illustrator Tasha Tudor, known as much for her total commitment to living an 1830s lifestyle as for her watercolors of corgis and children. I tried to fashion a quill pen from a feather I’d found in the park (I had to switch to ballpoint) and donned the pair of pantaloons I favored for moments of maximum picturesqueness. “Dear Tasha Tudor” (I wrote), “I think we have a lot in common.” I detailed my near-worship of “A Time to Keep,” my attempts to replicate the Pumpkin House of “The Dolls’ Christmas,” the wonky maypole I had rigged up in the yard.

A classmate, over for a playdate, found the letter and mocked it, but I was undeterred. I applied sealing wax and dropped it in a mailbox. Maybe it was the fact that I sent it to “Tasha Tudor, Marlboro, VT,” but I never heard back.

I should have learned my lesson, but my misadventures did result in the following recommendations.

—Sadie

“Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice,” by D.H. Melhem

Nonfiction, 1987