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A candid and enlightening account of life with flawed vision

Alice Mattison observes the world differently: Her sight has been altered by a progressive eye disease. Mattison had hints early in life of something amiss when reading became difficult, and she was diagnosed in her forties with a rare form of macular degeneration—a disease that gradually destroyed her central vision in one eye. Years later, another form of the same disease threatened her other eye, further altering her sight. Her eye ailments affect relationships with friends, students, doctors, her partner—and especially with herself. Mattison asks questions that apply to all of us, whether or not we live with imperfect vision: What can we learn from a medical problem? How do we determine how bad it is? Who gets to decide that—our family and friends, our doctors, or we ourselves? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what good can come of disease?

What Clever Friends, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, is a selection of engaging, frank letters between poet Jane Kenyon and fiction writer Alice Mattison. Ranging from their first meeting in 1979 to Kenyon’s death in 1995, this fifteen-year conversation between close friends reveals their experiences pursuing writing while living out the responsibilities of ordinary life. Writing to each other often, they help each other, confide in each other, and argue through the strains of rejection and acceptance, good reviews and bad, periods in which writing comes easily or when it does not. Over time, both writers emerged from obscurity to gain award-winning recognition as prominent voices in their respective genres.

Witty, tender, and aware; tempestuous and lyrical, these letters trace the evolution of a deep and largely unknown friendship that situates Kenyon’s work within a collaborative environment of other poets and novelists who were committed to the flourishing of contemporary women’s writing. With more than 500 edited and annotated letters, a retrospective foreword written by Alice Mattison, and a scholarly introduction written by Chad Wriglesworth, What Clever Friends conveys a compelling story that will interest readers and writers.