Book Recommendation: ‘Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable’

"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn is set around the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Illustrated by Brittany Worsham. Courtesy of Dzanc Books

Wordsmiths and bibliophiles unite as Mark Dunn’s “Ella Minnow Pea” celebrates its 20th anniversary by releasing an illustrated edition to mark this milestone.

‘A Novel in Letters’

Ella Minnow Pea resides in the fictional island of Nollop, where Nevin Nollop, the fictitious inventor of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” hails from. Nollopians pride themselves in their broad vocabulary and, in the absence of the telephone and technology, exercise their main form of communication on the island through letter-writing.

When an alphabet letter tile forming the famous pangram falls off from the top of the cenotaph of its esteemed creator, the five-men Council takes this as a sign that Nollop, communicating from beyond the grave, wishes the letter to be removed from usage. The fateful “Z” is the first to be removed from the islanders’ utterances and printed forms. Though Nollopians are able to skirt around words like “amazing” and “crazy,” they soon realize that there is more to banning one letter, albeit one that is “marginally important,” than they realize. It means that the library will have to be purged of any books containing the condemned letter. Also, as they have to be extra careful of what words come out of their mouths and what words to use when they correspond by mail, cousin Tassie points out, the whole exercise “stands to rob us of the freedom to communicate without any fetter or harness.”

The 20th Anniversary Edition of "Ella Minnow Pea" includes illustrations by Brittany Worsham. This is the fateful scene where letter tiles fall off and are then banned from use. Courtesy of Dzanc Books

The mandate comes from Nollop’s Councilmembers who are “instituted for life” and their recall from office involves “complicated legal procedures” making their authority paramount and all-encompassing.

The story gets more challenging as whatever fixant was used to hold up the letter tiles starts losing its stickiness (though you can’t make that argument with the Council), and more letter tiles come tumbling down. As more letters are banned, Nollopians find it increasingly challenging to avoid them. They pride themselves in their lexicon and verbosity, and this means being creative in choosing the best words without infringing upon the mandates. One will therefore see some very uncommon words like “lucubrating,” “aposiopesis,” and “piscivorous” sprinkled throughout the text.

The Writing Process

Author Mark Dunn has won accolades for Ella Minnow Pea ever since its first release in 2001. Courtesy of Mark Dunn

Author Mark Dunn gets creative in mixing words together by creatively compounding and blending words to form portmanteaus, as well as using alliteration to come up with catchy phrases like “bastinado-beneficed baboons” to describe the Council members (and yes, all three are real words!).

Dunn explained in an email, “Some of the words came from that infrequent-use category, but a good many of them were words I deliberately coined myself in service to the story. I think I once counted over one hundred neologisms I came up with that cannot be found in a dictionary.” A few examples include “illicitabeticals” (illicit-alphabet to describe the forbidden letters), “posteritified” (to mean immortalized), and “heavipendence” (heavy dependence).

Mark Dunn, who is also a playwright of over 30 plays, calls himself a “word and language geek.” While working in the Rare Books section of the New York Public Library, he delved into the research of lipogrammatic writing, whereby a letter (or letters) is deliberately deleted from the text. “What I came to realize is a few had achieved this feat but no one had set out on a mission to write a book in which there was a ‘progressive loss’ of letters of the alphabet from the pages of the book as the story went along.” This led to the birth of “Ella Minnow Pea.”

Successful Start and Lasting Legacy

Mark Dunn has garnered numerous accolades for his maiden book. He was a Barnes and Noble New Writer pick and was Borders’s Original Voices Fiction Book of the Year. The book has been written into a play (simply titled “LMNOP”), and Dunn himself directed the readers’ theater production of it.

As “Ella Minnow Pea” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year (delayed due to COVID-19), Dunn decided to release an illustrated version of the book in collaboration with artist Brittany Worsham.

Dunn’s future projects may include putting Ella, Tassie, and other Nollopians on the big screen as an independent movie production in collaboration with his wife, Mary, who will co-write the screenplay. It is truly a testament to the enduring legacy of this story.

For those in need of a quick chuckle and a vocabulary boost, this is a fun book that showcases the flexibility and resilience of the English language. For those who feel nostalgic for the good old days of pen-and-paper correspondences, this book warms the heart. And for those who need that gentle reminder that authoritarianism could be just one letter away, “Ella Minnow Pea” is a light dig on the fragility of our current way of life. Readers will find it a truly insightful read.

The 20th anniversary copy of Mark Dunn's "Ella Minnow Pea" is brought to life with illustrations by Brittany Worsham. Dzanc Books

‘Ella Minnow Pea: 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition’ By Mark Dunn Dzanc Books, May 2, 2023 Hardcover: 210 pages