It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but the good news is, I HAVE been writing. There was a two and a half year period after graduate school during which I hardly wrote a word. In part this was because teaching high school consumed every spare minute of nearly every day, but also because I think I just felt defeated. I had a partly finished manuscript that I didn’t know what to do with (This is still true.), and I missed being in graduate school where I was surrounded by people who valued writing the way I did, and I felt unmotivated and incapable of producing anything worth looking at. It was a year ago that I started really writing again. It began with some letters.
If you know me, you know how much I love letters. The first letters I ever received were in kindergarten. I was a socially anxious kid, miserable at school because, though I loved learning, I was afraid of talking to strangers. My parents tried to help by leaving tiny letters in my lunch box wishing me a happy day at school. My dad called them Happy Day Notes. Each of them featured one of his increasingly elaborate stick figure drawings of me, or the two of us, doing something fun and decidedly unrelated to school—us riding his motorcycle or flying in a fighter jet or, after I started gymnastics, me mid-flight above a balance beam or standing atop a podium with a medal around my neck. My stick figure’s hair was always a long wavy line sprouting from the top of my head, and his stick figure always wore a baseball cap (presumably to make his gender apparent because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear a baseball cap). The Happy Day Notes continued throughout elementary school. I cannot say with certainty that they succeeded in making me particularly joyful about being at school as I read them under the lunch table amidst the high pitched chatter of my fellow 6-year-olds and the unmistakable smell of elementary school cafeteria. But they did make me smile. And 23 years later, I recognize that they also taught me a lesson that I did not know I was learning and that my parents did not realize they were teaching—the lesson that sometimes written words have greater meaning than spoken ones.
By 4th and 5th grade, everyone wrote letters. The bold kids threw paper airplane notes to their crushes when the teacher looked away. The rest of us scratched notes to pass under the table to our friends. Notes elicited giggles and blushes and were full of code names in case they were confiscated. Creative note-folding was a sought-after skill that the popular students learned from older friends and the precocious students learned from library books. (In retrospect, I’m impressed by our late-90s selves for our ingenuity in the days before Youtube tutorials.) Groups of eager students sat in circles at recess to teach each other the intricate origami that would make their letters, and therefore themselves, cooler than a boring folded square.
Though talking to people was hard for me, writing only ever felt exciting. This is how I became a letter-writing enthusiast. One friend and I wouldn’t settle for our classmates’ punctuation-free scribbles about crushes, and a mere piece of paper wasn’t enough to contain all we wanted to say, so we started writing our letters in a notebook and traded that back and forth instead. We wrote more in those notebooks than I think we ever wrote for our classes, and we filled several of them by the end of the year. When it was my friend’s turn with the notebook, I wrote letters to other classmates and letters that I delivered after school in my gymnastics teammates’ lockers. After finding a way to share the things I was too shy to speak aloud, I never ran out of words to write or people to write them to.
The volume of notes passed decreased in middle school, and the content of many that were still circulating turned into R-rated confessions and cruel rumors. Gradually everyone started getting cell phones, and by halfway through high school, texts had taken the place of letters and handwritten correspondence became nearly obsolete. My handful of recipients changed and then narrowed, but a small group of us never stopped writing. Our letters were full of novel quotes, song lyrics, dramatic stories, and inside jokes. They were longer than our research papers and more passionate than work we did for any class. We started blogs where we wrote posts in second-person to anonymous “you”s—the letters we couldn’t bring ourselves to give to their recipients because they said things that felt too honest. We transcribed them from scribbled pages and let strangers on the internet read them instead. My written words communicated something far closer to what I wanted to say than I felt my spoken words ever could.
My best friend, Sam, and I left Mississippi for college—her for Chicago, me for Providence. Though we spoke on the phone every day, we never stopped writing letters. During freshman year, the letters felt like a lifeline to our “real” lives, and we sent them every week or two. After that, our college lives became our real, and busy, lives, and we tried to send letters every month or so instead. Hers often including drawings (she’s an artist), and mine were usually longer. Our letters were essentially journal entries in which we tried to untangle our thoughts and emotions by putting them on paper. I kept a journal as well, and many letters I sent to Sam were lifted straight from my journal pages. I was majoring in fiction writing and spending hours each week working on short stories, but the letters I sent to Sam felt more honest than anything I tried to convey in my fiction. And then halfway through college, I took a creative nonfiction class and realized what should have been obvious but felt shocking instead—that the type of writing in my letters was a legitimate form of creative writing, too, and that it could be more than just a hobby.
So I decided to go to graduate school for creative nonfiction writing. My roommate there, Sophie, was a letter writing enthusiast, as well. We would sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, writing memoir chapters for our workshops or editing our classmates essays. Perhaps this was the mid-20-year-old’s version of our teenage blogs—another effort to organize untidy thoughts into relatable experience. Every few weeks, we’d find ourselves together at the table without our computers, writing letters to faraway friends instead.
And then came the lull after graduate school. There were a couple of full-time jobs and lengthy job searches, both of which drained my time and mental energy. Longterm writing projects lay neglected on my bookshelves. This past fall, I realized I’d written hardly any letters in the past year. So on a whim, I embarked upon a letter writing project.
Last Halloween, I decided that I would write a letter to a different person for every day of November, mostly as a challenge just to see if I could do it. I made a list of rules for myself—I couldn’t write to the same person twice. I couldn’t write to family members (though I made an exception for distant relatives I have not met in person). I could mail a package instead of a letter, but it had to include at least a small written component. The letters had to be handwritten and mailed (except for one letter I delivered in person). When I came up with the idea, I could not name 30 plausible recipients—people who would not be confused or creeped out upon receiving a letter from me. I realized that it is nearly impossible for a 28-year-old female to ask old friends for their addresses without them assuming they are about to receive a wedding announcement. My mom kindly supplied, “Won’t the guys think you’re flirting with them?” (Would they?) It felt awkward and a little too weird, and I considered giving up on the idea. I made myself send the first letter instead.
I sent letters to Sam and Sophie and my other closest friends first, which felt easy and familiar. I sent letters to other letter-writing friends who I’ve exchanged letters with before. I mailed brownies and brief letters to friends with birthdays in November. I mailed letters to old friends I haven’t spoken to in a decade, to people I’ve only met once (or in a couple of cases, that I’ve never met in person), to the elementary school friend I shared the notebook with, to the high school friends whose “secret” blogs I used to read, to my former roommates, to the teacher of my first-ever writing workshop, to my writer friends from college and graduate school. I guessed a couple of addresses and sent a couple of extra letters to make up for it. I’d worried that after running out of obvious recipients, the letters may start to feel forced and obligatory to write. None of them did. I sent letters to 25 different cities in 14 different states.
When I finished the project, I expected to be burnt out and unable to write anything else for a while. Instead I couldn’t stop writing. I started essays that have been in the back of my mind for a while. I started submitting essays I’d been too self-conscious to try publishing. I’ve been more productive with my writing than I have been since completing my MFA program. Most people were thrilled to receive their letters, and (as far as I know) no one was too creeped out. I reconnected with several old friends and have stayed in touch with a few of them. I’ve received a handful of response letters that I did not expect and was irrationally excited by each of them. I wrote them because I wanted to write them, not because I wanted responses. Maybe I instinctively knew that returning to letters, the original source of my writing, would give me the motivation I needed to write anything else.
If it’s been a while (or, say, a decade) since you wrote a letter, I have a new address I’d be happy to give you.
