Dear Friends of Maria,

Summer 2023
Bradford-on-Avon, UK
Tom, Sept 5

Dear Marigolds,

Friendship and reading take time, but I tend to be pushy with both. Sarah Chihaya, The Ferrante Letters.

I know, I’m an impatient friend. This is not the first time I’ve proposed a project for the three of us. I hope you receive it as the compliment it is meant to be. In recently reading The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, I was immediately jealous of these four authors, academics, and friends who had given themselves permission and time to collaborate on a lengthy reading and writing project. Over four months, they read and critiqued Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy, The Neapolitan Quartet, through letters sent to one another. They call this new form of textual engagement “collective criticism.” I’m sorry, I can’t help myself. In every collaborative project, I see opportunities to further our companionship.

So, here it is. Inspired by the model proposed in The Ferrante Letters, I propose we read one book by Maria Montessori a month, and write 1-2 letters each a month with our thoughts. We all started as Montessori 6-12 educators around the same time, 10 years ago, but now find ourselves in very different places in our careers, in different states, different countries. Revisiting her writing a decade after our training should be interesting, and I imagine we’ll each bring our unique contexts and perspectives to the text. Chelsea is currently a homeschool expert at Guidepost Montessori, Justin is a school administrator, and Tom is a teacher and consultant in the UK.

This epistolary mode should serve us well. Consider this a conversation between friends, and take the pressure off yourselves. The desire to write that one perfect post can be paralyzing, but in this project we are more than the sum of our parts. In The Ferrante Letters, they established a goal that “each letter would build on the arguments of previous letters by agreeing, disagreeing, extending, and reframing.” The purpose of “collective criticism” therefore is to pull back the curtain on the writing process and bring the messy and vital exchange of thoughts that informs it to the fore, to “make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all acts of criticism.” There is no need for each letter to feel like a polished product because it is all more interesting as a work in process.

This gives us all permission to be creative. Letters can be unfinished and imperfect. They can explore different modes: personal stories, academic writing, poetry, historic research, etc. You can even do all of these in the course of one letter if that’s where your fancy takes you. The same is true of your reading. It can be imperfect and unfinished too. Neither of you have ever been short of something interesting to say, and that is all this project asks of you.

I, for one, am excited to embark on this journey with you. We have our first book scheduled for the month of September, The Child, Society, and the World: Unpublished Speeches and Writings (1989). Enjoy! I look forward to hearing from you both.

Your companion,

Tom