What Clever Friends
What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, will by published on July 14, 2026 by The University of Michigan Press. Here's the publisher's description of the book:
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.
Events
Sunday, July 19, 2026 2:00 PM at Newtonville Books
10 Langley Rd
Newton, MA
(617) 244-6619
A conversation and reading with Rebecca Chace
We’ll be discussing friendship among women and reading from new books: Beka’s novel Talking to the Wolf, about four women reuniting decades after they became friends in high school, and What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, edited by Chad Wriglesworth: letters that Jane and I wrote in the eighties and nineties, as we tried to become writers and to figure out how to be friends as we did so.
Thursday, September 3, 2026 9 AM
Interview by E. Ethelbert Miller for “On the Margin” WPFW 89.3
Thursday, September 17, 2026 7PM
Sleeping Giant Reading Series and Writers’ Happy Hour, Best Video, 1842 Whitney Avenue, Hamden CT
I’ll be reading from and discussing What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison along with its editor, Chad Wriglesworth. Also reading that evening is Larissa Pham, author of the novel Discipline.