—What would you say to this person, and what do expect the response to be?

Brockmeier: "Who is this odd little man," James Agee would be certain to think when he saw me, "and what is he doing in my office?" I'm sure he would be reluctant to believe me when I told him that I had come from the future to show him some movies I thought he might enjoy. But after a few minutes of conversation any doubts he might have would begin to waver, and once I booted up the computer and loaded the first DVD, he would be absolutely convinced by my story. "No," I would explain to him, "people in 2008 don't do all their movie-watching on these little plastic cases with the flat screens. They're portable, though, and I had no way of carrying an entire theater back in time with me. I apologize."

Crosley: I think I would ask him which of his stories he personally got the most out of writing. I would probably also ask him about the last days of his life, assuming that he understands me meeting him is an experiment and wouldn’t be offended by me saying, “hey, what kind of torture is it to attempt to kill yourself and them die anyway a few years later?”

Gee: I'd want to ask her how an eighteenth century mother felt about her children, living in a world where childbirth was dangerous and where children might die, what it felt like traveling across Europe in a carriage, unprotected from winter weather and dangerous roads—basically what it was like to live in luxury, and yet be constantly in danger. I don't know what she'd say—these are aspects of eighteenth century life I can't get my head around.

Hunt: I certainly wouldn’t tell him that I wrote a novel about him! Though perhaps I would slip a copy under his pillow so he’s find it after I was long gone. I’d tell him that six months after he died the Supreme Court finally ruled that he is the man who invented radio, not Marconi. I wouldn’t tell him that no one pays any attention to that decision.

Pritchard: How fortunate, to have lived nearly one thousand years as a sumptuous, holy whore of English history! How I envy your chapel’s very foundational stone, inscribed H: DI. GRA. REX ANGL. ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of England.’... envy your witness to centuries of spiritual tediums and raptures, to poetry’s transcendence, to aesthetic fevers, to ambition’s Machiavellian labors. You have been like the greatest of actresses, and the longest lived—you have been and you remain, the mirrored surface, the immortal fragment of glass every novelist wishes to be.

The response: a predictable, contrapuntal, maddening Silence.