Letters to Jyl: September 21, 2026

What is Fat Bear week and why is Jyl getting letters over it?

Fat Bear Week starts tomorrow, which means for one glorious week the internet sets down its usual business to argue about which enormous bear got the most enormous before winter. It’s one of my favorite things. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to open my mailbox and find this letter. It came from a bear who isn’t on the bracket at all this year, and who would like me to know that this is everyone’s loss but his.

Dear Jyl,

For nine summers, I owned this river. I didn’t ask for the falls; I took them. Along with the biggest fish and the best spot on the lip where the salmon jump straight into your mouth if you’re patient and terrible enough. Bears with twice my size stepped aside when I came down the bank. Even 747, who outweighs me (and everyone else) would look at the water very hard and pretend he’d wanted a different spot all along.

Then the humans built a bracket. Every fall they hold a popularity contest for who got the fattest. Last year they gave the crown to 32 Chunk. 32 What kind of name is that? He’s a pleasant, roundish animal who broke his own jaw and somehow made that endearing. I made it to the finals, but I lost to a bear whose entire personality is “accident prone and agreeable.” This year they didn’t even put me on the list.

I’m not asking to be liked, Jyl. I never was liked. I was respected, which is better. But I’ll admit the current pushes harder against me lately, and the young males don’t move when I come down the bank anymore. Scaring bears off the falls was the only thing I was ever good at. I don’t know what I am without it. Do I campaign? Do I learn to be charming?

Unbracketed and Bitter,

856

Dear 856,

Here’s the thing nobody tells the apex predator on his way down: the fall is the easy part. It’s the standing in the same river afterward that gets you. So, you lost to a bear named Chunk who did it with a broken jaw, and you’re still saying his name like it’s a swear word. Yeah, I’d write me too.

Let’s set the record straight before we go any further. You ran that river for nine summers. Bears who could’ve folded you in half looked at you coming down the bank and found somewhere else to be. Most animals don’t get one season like that in a whole life. Whatever the bracket says this year, those nine summers are still yours.

But you built the whole thing on being feared, and fear has a shelf life. It runs out on everybody. If you stay the scariest thing at the falls for a long while, then the young ones stop flinching, the water stops clearing out when you walk up, and some cheerful mountain of a bear takes the crown with his jaw still healing. You can’t lay that at the humans’ feet, and Chunk didn’t steal anything from you either. Everyone has to wade into that same slow current eventually.

So don’t campaign. I’m begging you. There’s nothing lonelier than a former king trying to learn charm in the fourth quarter, and you’d be god-awful at it. Sit with this instead. Think about what the humans are actually counting when they vote. Whether a bear ate enough to live through the winter. That’s you, 856. You made the final last year at an age when most of your rivals are just a legend the park rangers tell. And stop waiting for me to tell you that you got robbed. You didn’t. You had the run of your life and it ended the ordinary way, which honestly beats the alternative, since most bears your size are a rug by now.

Go eat something, get fat. Do it for the winter. Do it out of pure spite. Both are good reasons, and you’ve earned the spite.

Warmly (and from a safe distance),

Jyl

Have a question, problem, curse, feud, haunting, career crisis, cryptid-related concern, or suspicious situation of your own? Send it to letterstojyl@gmail.com. Anonymous submissions are always welcome.

Jyl Glenn is a writer, editor, formatter, anthologist, poet, and a medical-legal writer and consultant. Her lifelong love affair with horror began at a very early age when she was left unattended on the weekend Poltergeist debuted on HBO. And then she figured out she could read any horror book she liked as long as she hung out at the public library, even if the librarian deemed it not to be age appropriate. Jyl was born and raised in New York and now lives in Tulsa with her dog and kitten. She loves creepy art, dark poetry, and pink dinosaurs. When she isn’t dabbling in the macabre—she’s most likely asleep.

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