From Daughters & Sons to Fathers:
What I’ve Never Said
Compiled and Edited by Constance Warloe
From
Daughters & Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said (Story Line Press
2001) is actually the second volume in an anthology project I began in 1995
and completed in 1999. The first volume, From Daughters to Mothers: I’ve
Always Meant to Tell You, was published in 1997.
For both volumes, I invited contemporary writers to address their respective
parents in the intimate, epistolary voice. I asked each of them to write a letter
and send a photograph as an end-of-century record of relationships that, for
all their emotional and chronological milestones, are never fully expressed
or understood. Searching for an authenticity beyond the sentimental tributes
of commercially dictated holidays or the self-serving memoirs in recent tell-all
books, I hoped that the universality of the topic and the literary sensibilities
of the writers might create a perspective on the intergenerational influences,
conflicts and desperately deep connections we have all experienced with our
parents.
The results have exceeded my expectations in both quality and impact. Post Road
has selected four of the best from the letters in From
Daughters & Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said. The letters
by Naomi Shihab Nye, Dawn Raffel,
Pablo Medina and David
Shields are so honest, revealing and true, so compellingly written, that
I can predict with some confidence that you, as a reader, will have that moment
which this project has aimed for, the moment of recognition when you are no
longer reading a literary work but reflecting instead on your relationship with
your own father. Read on. —C.W.