Dear Reader,
You could call “Love Letters to America” a lot of things. An extended, non-continuous road trip; a writing project; a newsletter; a quarter life crisis. Here’s the truth: I am obsessed with America, addicted to driving around America, and the only cure is to tell you about it.
Next year is our nation’s 250th birthday, which makes the burden of loudly loving America even stronger on my shoulders.
When I lived in California, I knew a man who repaired typewriters in Salinas. I fell in love with typewritten letters. Salinas is the hometown of John Steinbeck, whose book “Travels With Charley in Search of America” is my favorite in the universe, and a principal inspiration for this undertaking. Steinbeck took a roadtrip in 1960 to find America, and wrote it into a wonderful book.
LLTA is my own exploration of the forgotten places, and the well-known places, too. It is a search for the things and people that make America unique and great. Once a month (or so) I’ll send you a Love Letter to America, typed up and mailed with a few photos in an envelope. Snail mail. That way, you can have it on paper. We’ll publish them on the Internet, too. And the first letter, Places Between Places is up now.
President Eisenhower left us with a great gift: the open road. Anywhere you are in this country, you can get up and go. If you dare… You don’t need to know where you are going. Stay with a friend. Stay at a hotel or a campground. Talk to strangers. See them at a diner, at a church, at a truck stop.
And the Internet has left us with another great gift: the open conversation. I can email thousands or more of you all at once, and you can write back! But if you ask me, there are too many email newsletters nowadays, so I wanted to send you LLTA the old fashioned way.
Eventually, we’ll compile these letters into a big beautiful book, and we’ll invite other people to publish their own love letters to America, to tell us what stirs them. I hope you’ll sign up for free today, and tell a friend. Or ten, or a hundred!
It’s free. But if you feel like giving us money, head over to Arena Magazine, our American techno-industrial propaganda magazine.
— Maxwell
