I love writers.

I especially love southern writers, and Kentucky writers, and expatriate southern and Kentucky writers.

I love being around them; I love talking to them on the phone; but I especially love getting mail from them.

One day in January, I received this email from my buddy Walt - a writer and editor who lives out west. I think he was a Michener fellow. I know he has a den full of awards. I always feel sorry for his readers because they're limited to pretty much one column a week from him - whereas I usually get to read something by him every few hours on any given day.

His staff refers to me as his "virtual" wife, which I don't like, because I think it makes me sound like someone he invented. I prefer "electronic wife" (which differentiates me from his incredibly cool and corporeal "real" wife).

This January email was about the parenthetical style of writing he now employs in his columns - honed, he says, from our many years of exchanging emails.

He began, "I never liked parentheses before I met you."

I laughed when I read that, because I like to imagine it sounds like the sort of pickup line that Cormac McCarthy might use on young girls in cutoffs in a bar just outside El Paso. I knew that wasn't how Walt meant it though.

He added, "But parenthetical talk really is southern talk, isn't it? What is a parenthetical statement but the kind of digression we got used to at Sunday dinners? Also, I have another great story about one of our maids (my favorite, a fat and wonderful woman named Alberta) who my mother sent home early one day (pure kindness on Mom's part) and even drove her home. Before we got back to our house, Alberta had gone in, caught her husband in bed with another woman, pulled the shotgun out from behind the door and killed them both. We also once had a maid who stole clothes off neighbors' clotheslines because she said she felt sorry for us. I remember the day she was arrested because a cop babysat me and my sister until my mom came home from work." Now that's a parenthetical!

Richard Hell, definitive godfather of punk, checks in electronically from time to time. Even his emails are like his music and his writing - vivid, edgy, sharp, sophisticated, metropolitan, and maybe a little superior (though I could WELL be projecting that last part from somewhere within my own profound insecurity since he intimidates me to the extent that I still address him as Mr. Hell).

Although I'm a slave to the electronic age, something in me admires those few who refuse to submit - because that means I still get real letters from them.

Larry Brown wrote this week full of news about the movie they've made of Big, Bad Love (my favorite book of short stories, along with Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). He'd written me last fall to tell me it was in progress, "Arliss Howard is fixing to start shooting this movie up at Holly Springs with his wife Debra Winger... I did get a small part for myself. I get to play Leon Barlow's dead daddy lying in a deep freeze."

He writes that his new book is due out April 13th (when he wrote in August, he said, "I may have done it tonight. Don't know yet. See how it looks tomorrow."), and that he'll probably be coming to town when it does. The best news I've had this year. He closes with, "Well it's late and I've got to go to an aunt's funeral a long way off early in the morning, so I'll close. Take care, good luck, like the dog with the cigar."

Right after Larry Brown, my dad is the best letter-writer I know. And I think in another time, given a different set of circumstances and opportunities, he would've certainly grown up to turn out a few great books. He even shares Larry's background in that they both did stints as firemen (and both have tremendous stories from the experience -though Larry's are award-winning, and nobody knows my Dad's except for me).

In one letter last summer, he recounted, "I was 40 some years old before ever seeing the ocean in Florida. If you are 30 years old now you will have to walk on the moon to catch up with me. Growing up, we would bring our water bucket into the bedroom at night to keep the dipper from getting frozen in the water."

His letters are full of meditations on poverty, rural life, race, economics, politics, and agriculture (the most recent being a story about a hog killing that would give Harry Crews a run for his money). Most of the time, they're everything great literature ought to be - filled with humor, pathos, and meticulous attention to detail.

I've always known I got my love of reading from my mother, but it's only within the last few years that I found out the love of writing comes from my dad.

As an editor, I always wonder how many would-be writers there are like him - holed up in some holler - their stories disappearing from the literary and oral landscape by the day.

It's my hope, with our literary magazine and our literary quarterly, that Ace will find room to share their voices with you in the coming years..

-Rhonda Reeves