By Barbara Ware Holmes

Ms. Julia Steward Jones
Editor
Springtime Press
One East 56th Street
New York, NY 10022

Dear Ms. Jones,
My name is Elizabeth Beech, and I am a sophomore at Edgewood Heights High School in Edgewood Heights, New Jersey. Yesterday, my English teacher, Mrs. Reeves, gave me your name. You're the editor of her best friend's sister, a writer named Gillian Watson. Mrs. Watson told my teacher that your press specializes in books for young people and that as an editor you're "generous to beginners." Mrs. Reeves (who was also my teacher last year) immediately made submitting something to you my personal assignment. She thinks I have talent. I don't know. In my opinion I have a lot to learn about life and writing. I admire a writer like Henry James. You can tell by his writing that he'd been everywhere and thought about everything and everyone he'd met before he wrote about any of it. I'm only fifteen and I haven't been anywhere. Mrs. Reeves says "leave it to an editor to decide if you have talent" and that "good editors help writers they believe in." That's a nice thought. I agreed to write a query in case she's right. My query is: Would you be willing to read Chapter One of the book I'm working on? I'd appreciate hearing anything you had to say, good or bad. Sometimes it seems to me that my life is filled with two kinds of people-those who only want to say bad and those who only want to say good, no matter what. I could use a true opinion.

Thank you very much for even reading this letter. I'll understand if you answer my query with "no."

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Beech

Springtime Press
One East 56th Street
New York, NY 10022
October 28, 1994

Ms. Elizabeth Beech
146 West Cliff Street
Edgewood Heights, NJ 08025

Dear Ms. Beech:

Certainly you are welcome to send me your chapter. I must warn you, however, that chances are slim it will find a home here. We receive many submissions from young people who have been prompted by well-meaning adults to submit them. Unfortunately, the fact that we specialize in books for children and young adults does not mean that we publish books by them. Such books are seldom polished enough to succeed on our list, no matter how great the blossoming talent.

Nevertheless, I shall read your chapter with interest if you choose to send't had anything new from her in quite a while.

Sincerely,
Julia Steward Jones
Editor

146 West Cliff Street
Edgewood Heights, NJ 08025
November 3, 1994

Ms. Julia Steward Jones
Springtime Press
One East 56th Street
New York, NY 10022

Dear Ms. Jones,

Thank you for answering my letter. I'm embarrassed that I took up your valuable time. I thought Mrs. Reeves (my teacher) would be also, but when she read your letter, she said, "There! Now you have an editor willing to read your writing. Send it!" So here it is, with new apologies.

Very sincerely,
Elizabeth Beech

Chapter One

I was ten years old when my family split apart. I don't mean split up, I mean split apart. My mother and Eric to the right side of the house, my father and me, Elspeth Nicholson, to the left. As far as I can tell, each of us broke right down the middle when it happened so that we're hollow inside-blank in our centers, like the empty hallway between the halves of the house, or the row of canisters in my mother's kitchen that no one bothers to fill.

I hate being with my father. Only his body is ever here. His mind, if he has one, always lives somewhere else. Once, when I was eleven, I tried to live in the hallway between the halves of the house, but it didn't work out. No bathroom. No food. No privacy, since my mother has to come into the hallway to get to her upstairs. Nothing but muddy boots and old umbrellas and me, tucked into a corner beside the stairs, watching the others come and go. It was almost like being homeless.

So, for six years, minus that short stretch in the hall, I've been with Dad. It's worked out perfectly for my parents-Eric to do the man's work for Mom and me to be the wife. I cook, clean, do laundry. Watch my father sulk.

"Grow up," I tell him (sounding like my mother!), but that only makes him worse. Someday I'll escape for real, to a place with a center that holds more than muddy boots. I know the place too-the very place. It's an apartment, occupied at the moment by my friend Angela's sister and her husband. They're saving their money for a house "a year or two down the road." Perfect. When they move out, I move in. That apartment is mine, I know it. I knew it from the very first minute I saw it. Angela's sister, Sammy, was standing in front of one of the huge wonderful windows that run from floor to ceiling, and the sun flashed around her as if she were made of metal. I was dazzled, like a baby when something sparkly and unexpected is dangled in front of its eyes. "Mine!" a voice hollered in my head.

Sammy doesn't have curtains on the windows and I won't either. "Light is everything," she says, and I mostly agree. Light and air. Space doesn't matter too much. I could live in a one-room apartment and be happy as long as it had a window and nobody else inside it. Funny-I feel suffocated in this whole big house, but I'd feel free in a tiny room.

Not that space isn't also nice-room for pictures and books. Sammy's apartment has a lot of space. It's perfect in every way. Lately, when I have extra money, I buy things for my future apartment. So far, I have a carved candle shaped like a flower to sit on my mantelpiece; blue cloth place mats with matching napkins (for my table that doesn't exist!); and one china teacup. I found the cup in an antique store. The lady who sold it to me said it had lost its value when it lost its matching saucer. Plus it has a chip you can hardly see on its bottom. Doesn't it matter that it also has delicate pink flowers painted on its side and solid gold around its rim? The lady practically gave it away, as if it were nothing.

ItŐs lonely seeing beauty where no one else sees it. Angela doesn't even notice her sister's apartment, and she agrees with my mother that pretty things are just clutter. My mother's philosophy is: if you can't use and abuse it, then throw it away. Or at something. She threw me at my father. He isn't fussy.

If you liked chapter one of Letters to Julia, find out more about the book.

Go back to the index of first chapters of new books for Fall 1999.