Dear unpublished letter writers, your moment awaits ... Pardon me for mentioning... Co-editors Julie Lewis and Catharine Munro discuss their new book Pardon me for mentioning... unpublished letters to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. PT4M44S http://www.smh.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2u22a 620 349 September 19, 2013 There are families across NSW whose members have letter-to-the-editor-writing in their DNA. Siblings compete to be the most published in the Herald, families torn by ideological divide exchange salvos, while others just take quiet pride in becoming a local hero when their work is published. But letter writing can be a harsh pursuit. Only one in five is published and the current and past Letters editors, Julie Lewis and Catharine Munro, lament the quality of some letters that go to waste. "Letter writers are keenly aware that only a tiny fraction of the material submitted is published and frequently write asking us to find some way of reviving the rejects," they said. So, with Melbourne journalist Alex Kaplan, they have edited Pardon me for mentioning ... Unpublished letters to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald to be published on Wednesday. Among the onslaught of opinion, outrage and humour, the names, characters and obsessions of regular letter writers become familiar to readers and something closer to editors. Occasionally an editor will receive pictures of a writer's grandchildren, a note from Paris or be swept into a domestic dispute. Many letter writers grew up in homes where the thump of the Herald on the driveway was a part of their childhoods. Peter Snowden, of Orange, spent much of his life teaching in rural NSW, but, unbeknown to scores of Letters editors, maintained a fraternal rivalry with his late brother Pat, a Sydney barrister, to score the highest number published each year. "The loser had to pay for a restaurant meal when the family got together in Sydney each Christmas," Mr Snowden recalled. Alicia Dawson, of Balmain, recalled bursting onto the page in 2010 with a spirited defence of using the c-word when referring to "my own quintessential female anatomy" but objecting to it as the ultimate derogatory swear word. Since then she has become a fixture: "I've even got my own little scrap book." Joan Croll, 85, and one of the women who served in the seminal conservationist battle to save Kelly's Bush, has written thousands of letters after starting in the early 1970s. "I did not keep the first letter but when my father died I found it in his diary," she said. When one of the Herald's most prolific letter writers, Rosemary O'Brien, threatened on election day she would burn the paper if anybody wrote they were ashamed to call themselves Australian, her sisters obliged the following Monday: We are Rosemary O'Brien's sisters, and yeah, Rosie, we are ashamed to call ourselves Australian. Sue Kane and Nell Downing, Wareemba.