When a woman offers Denver’s residents the chance to be heard, stories spill out.
Moving from Tennessee to Denver, from southern hospitality and close-knit communities to a place where residents are polite but distant with “big-city banter” that doesn’t quite cut it, Kelly feels a gap. She wants to know Denver on a deeper level.
She purchases a blank journal and leaves it at a bus stop, inviting strangers to write whatever they want and mail it to her when it’s full. This innocent exercise reveals that everyone carries a story within them.
As the journal passes through dozens of hands, varied entries teach how seemingly ordinary people carry extraordinary weight. Over eighteen months pass and she hears stories from a homeless Vietnam veteran who rescues kittens from dumpsters, a stripper who falls in love with a regular who never undresses, a transgender man who just wants to be called “a person,” a florist who delivers lavender roses to a dementia patient who no longer recognizes her husband, and more.
Kelly is full of Tennessee idioms (“full as a tick,” “happy as a dead pig in the sunshine”), immediately adding personality to the book, but the true anchor here is Dave, one of the journal’s writers. He’s a homeless veteran who finds the journal while digging through trash, and his entries are disarmingly plain and quietly humanizing: “I woke up at dawn, as usual, under the train shelter. It gets quiet around 2:30 am unless the Broncos win a game; them nights hold no rest.”
Through Dave, author Jaclyn Duden achieves the kind of specificity that makes a character unforgettable. He feels like such a real person—wearing a bike chain around his neck, holding onto an expired ID because he can’t afford to replace it, and filtering Cherry Creek water with coal and sand.
The novel is steadily grounded in the neighborhoods of Denver, Colorado. We move from the 7-Eleven on W. Alameda Ave to the X bar, to rumbling trains that can be felt in your teeth. The entries can be quite moving, like with Lily’s story of “Scrunchy Steve,” who buys lavender roses every Friday for his wife with dementia: “She has severe dementia, and she doesn’t remember who he is… But when he shows up with those, even if she doesn’t recognize him, she looks at him like she always used to, like he’s her home.”
Beneath all the grief and unburdening of heavy topics, Dear Denver is genuinely funny too. Among my favorites is an exchange between a CEO and his secretary who snipe at each other across entries: “Shawn! Stop leaving this on my desk. I still need to [work] and order your wife flowers (seriously, can you really not do better?” … Also, you just wrote a lot of stuff in here that people kind of shouldn’t see. Why would you WRITE DOWN that we want to fire Frank?”
Flipping through the pages, one doesn’t know what to expect, whether it’ll be a heavy confession or something funny.
Duden has a real knack for letting a single, unadorned detail carry an entire entry, resisting the urge to explain or embellish, making the journal feel more like a stack of confessionals not meant to be found. Letting the journal wander wherever its anonymous contributors take it is a structural risk the book handles well and that risk pays off.
The novel is based on Duden’s real journal project, which means readers may finish feeling they have witnessed dozens of lives, but there are several unresolved questions too, like with the paranoid entry by a man named James that’s full of “nongovernmental enigmas” and streetlights that turn off for a reason. Without much narrative consequence, they read more like fragments from a different book. Duden’s commitment to include every voice is admirable, but it can at times feel overstuffed. At the same time, perhaps a little messiness is the point.
Offering marginalized voices a chance to be heard, Jaclyn Duden’s epistolary novel Dear Denver is a heartfelt debut that balances grit with tenderness. While reading, one can’t help but wonder what a city might sound like if everyone were truly heard.
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