First, Mr. John Fontaine, noted pulp fiction writer, has decided to call his weekly column “John Fontaine Presents…” He says that our first-ever reader poll is arbitrary and that he picked the name “John Fontaine Presents…” because it makes him feel like he has a special type of gift associated with his name, as in, “I didn’t know what to get my family for the holidays this year, but then I found out about John Fontaine presents.”
Also, we finally received the first said column from Mr. Fontaine, which we reprint here, in full and unedited, as promised and contractually obligated:
Dear Loyal John Fontaine Presents… Readers,
I write to you today in the epistolary style of my grandfather, Grandpa Fontaine, man of letters. More specifically he worked for the postal service, delivering mail. But I distinctly remember letters always swirling around him, and now in retrospect I think he really must’ve been stealing them. His name, Grandpa, didn’t serve him well in his youth, but rest assured was something he grew into, like a good pair of shoes.
I tell you these things because so many readers have been electronically-mailing me questions about how I got started as a writer, and the answer is that Grandpa Fontaine, man of letters, was my first inspiration. The man believed in pen and paper, in the ink that ran like blood on a page, in the living space created between the literal and the metaphorical, and should he still be alive today he would surely be flabbergasted by all this electronic mail going around, all ephemeral, all non-physical, and all un-stealable.
Every night before I fell asleep at Grandpa Grandpa’s house he would read me letters from all over the world, full of characters and references that neither of us understood, and we would laugh and cry and imagine possibilities. Of course now that I think about it the letter stealing must’ve been connected to his habit of shoplifting. If I had been a bit older perhaps I could’ve helped him; he was so slow by the time he finally got caught I’m really not sure how it didn’t happen sooner.
Yours most truly,
John Fontaine
Noted pulp fiction writer
JohnFontaine [at] bobsoldout.com
