"..To be present in such intimacy, such closeness, despite being “without corporeal friend.” To truly pause and think of another—and of yourself in the mind of another..."
As I "declutter" my life post divorce I ran across a box of letters from my ex wife. Now I've shredded 40 years of sermons and paperwork I no longer need. But this "fake book box " of handwritten letters hasn't been tossed. .yet, for reasons you've stated.
That is essentially the beginning of my novel, "The Letters." A box of letters to a forbidden lover is discovered after the writer of the letters dies. I can't throw out another's words of connection. Letters are somehow sacred to me.
The essence of voice is found in letters. There's nothing truer than a letter writer's voice becoming audible when the letter's recipient reads the words silently or aloud. Thanks for this post, Grant!
Good point. It is a great exercise for developing and recognizing one's voice. I always used to think my letters were my best writing because of that: a letter is where my voice came out.
Oh, Grant. I just wrote a handwritten letter to my middle daughter a couple of weeks ago. She flew out to visit, and I wrote in small script inside a blank card, covering the inner main parts and the backside. I tucked the sealed envelope inside the outer pocket of a large carry-on I was gifting to her, for her future travel adventures. (There's a story about the bag, too).
A couple of years ago, when she left alone to teach in Spain for a year, I mailed her handwritten cards, which reminded me of the letters I exchanged with family and friends, both old and new, back when I joined the Navy in 1992. I kept all of those, and I used to think about where each person may have sat as they wrote, imagining them in each of their homes, and how intimate the words are when the shape of each letter is unique to each individual, some of whom are now long gone. The most important part of our days at sea was mail call.
A little over a year ago, I was going through some old bins, and I came across neat stacks of old letters. Some were from friends back home who were in college, sharing the worries and concerns of young people. Others were from new friends, a few of whom were in the BUDS program, others were stationed in various parts of the world, one I had briefly dated, and then he left for Reykjavik, Iceland (I was in Italy). We were flung across the globe, and it was pre-Internet, so it was challenging to keep in touch. I wonder what became of so many of my old friends, what their futures were like, what happened next?
The lost art of handwritten letters.
P.S. I just remembered this. People used to tell me I had very nice handwriting. I haven't heard that phrase in a very long time.
Love this, Joy. You have your own essay on letter writing here, so you should keep writing it.
I especially love your act of tucking a letter into your daughter's luggage as a little gift to find. Reminds me of when I would sometimes put a note in my kids' lunches. I want to write more "secret" letters like this.
“Secret” letters are ways that we can be right there with someone, when we aren’t. What a wonderful idea; we can re-start anything, any time we want. I imagine a myriad of stories coming from doing something like this.
In my upcoming "flash novel," the two main characters write postcards to addresses of houses they like, without knowing who lives there. Just random postcards sent into the world.
Letter writing is a topic near and dear to my heart! When I was in the Peace Corps (in the 90s), I too went to a coffeeshop almost every day and wrote someone back home a letter. Email at the time was still fairly new, but it was also inaccessible to me. I still have every letter anyone sent, including the many letters my then-boyfriend (now husband) wrote to me. One friend sent the best letters! She'd include comics or random pictures she'd cut from magazines or newspapers, and she'd write weird notes, doodles, or jokes on the back of the envelopes.
These days, I still write real letters and postcards. I send one friend two or three postcards a week even though we pretty much live in the same neighborhood. She's had some rough times and it cheers her up. And I also have a working typewriter! A couple times a year, I type letters to my Patrons. I mail them art every month, but I also love typing each of them a letter because who doesn't love getting real mail? (If I ever have a significant number of Patrons, I might be in trouble! Ha!)
Well, you've inspired me. Later today I'm going to blog about letter writing, and I'm going to get out the typewriter. Thank you!
Oh, I too had a friend who sent me fun odds and ends in her letters. All of these little treats. And ... yes, the envelope (and what might be written on it) was a key part of the letter writing experience (thanks for reminding me of that).
I recently received a couple of postcards from people who live close by, and I was touched by them.
This one touches my heart. Not only as a lifelong letter writer, beginning in childhood with my grandmother, but one who still has every love letter from every sweetheart, especially those with tear-stained pages . . .and also as one writing historical fiction with hundreds of letters from the mid-19th century to inform her story (though in Danish.)
I’ve just begun a conversation with a fairly new friend about the “instant intimacy” of asynchronous voice messaging. It’s letter writing and even closer — time and space to reflect and compose and edit, but the immediacy of voice.
We are 8 hours apart across time zones, oceans, and continents. I sit with my phone and AirPods on my balcony and speak to him. I’m freer, more emboldened to be more authentic and transparent. And then hours later he’s talking to me from a train in the U.K. responding and extending the conversation.
The voice with the distance is confusing and interesting and much deeper — without the record of a letter that can be archived, but the recording can be saved and re-played. We were wondering if there are studies out there and speculating on whether it is a “false intimacy.”
This idea of letter exchange has me thinking about the collaborative nature and what’s being generated . . . and the similarities and differences with letter writing. 🤔
As always, thank you for giving me much to ponder and discuss.
From my informal survey, it's amazing how many of we letter writers began by writing to our grandparents. My grandmother was my first love in my letters.
I'm intrigued by the "false intimacy" you mention because I've wondered something similar. I don't consider it false, but enhanced. You're creating intimacy in a different environment/landscape--via distance and the imagination. So the imagination definitely plays a larger role in projecting a story and "creating" the other than it does if you see someone every day, but I don't think of that as false. Maybe, in fact, it magnifies the truth of one's intimacy.
Maybe it’s “scary true closeness” rather than “false intimacy” — the paradoxical intimacy in distance. It certainly has me curious and questioning. Thank you so much for this post. Now I’m intent on buying a beautiful set of stationery and collecting addresses. 😉
Thank you for your ode! I've begun writing by hand again (cursive) and it's been grounding and quieting. And, it's such a treat to send, and receive, a letter amongst the bills and junk.
wonderful post, Grant! Like you, I grew up in the era of writing letters, and because I lived far away from my home country before I learned to read and write — before the age of the www.com — letter writing was a normal mode of communication.
My love letters as a young adult included an exchange with my youngest brother who became an adventurer at the age of 19 and sent accounts of his journeys around Africa, Martinique and beyond... until he unexpectedly drowned in a diving accident. Those letters home became his legacy.
The last (unexpected) letter I received was last month for my birthday from my youngest daughter, telling me how much she appreciates me — heartwarming and precious, far beyond an email or SMS.
The last physical letters I've written was to my grandson who is growing up in the digital age, and receiving a real letter in the actual mailbox of his home is so much more exciting...
My husband and I met writing letters to each other for months before our first physical meeting. I've burnt all previous love letters from 'no longer relevant relationships'. ... to receive letters I've written to someone in the distant past, meeting my past self, feels both intriguing and unsettling...
Letters are so versatile and unique. I sometimes wonder about it as my preferred genre for a book — an exchange of letters with another writer perhaps?
I love your letter-writing history! You should definitely write an essay about this. So many interesting "moments" with letters, especially from your brother to your grandchild. Thanks so much for sharing!
When I was in college and had to do my laundry, I’d lug it to the laundromat and would also be sure to bring along pen and paper. Then I’d toss the clothes in the washer and start writing a letter. At some point I’d need to move the clothes to the dryer. But the 1-2 hours time it took for clothes to wash and dry seemed to always pass in a blur as I sat and wrote. Having these one-way conversations with my friends from afar somehow always lightened my mood, so that by the time I left the laundromat, both my clothes and my mind felt cleansed, refreshed.
Love this story. I've actually heard about people doing this with novel writing--weaving in writing in between household chores and writing while the washer or dryer ran. I'm more likely to do this with letter writing, though, I think. My dryer is broken, so ... I think I'll take you up on this idea.
The letters I sent to my grandmother from college got so long she'd say, "I got your latest book." Those letters took days to write, days to travel from Arcata, CA back to Long Island, NY. Phone calls were too expensive, personal computers didn't exist. Was life slower? Were we more deliberate with the way we communicated? These days, when I put a genuine letter in the mailbox, or a stack of Christmas cards, I can't help wishing for a magic mailbox to return real mail to me in equal measure.
I think life was a lot slower. Less congested. More focused. And ... part of writing a letter was in the anticipation of it arriving and then getting a reply. We lived in a state of beautiful suspense.
Love this post! When my family moved from Chicago to one of its suburbs in 1975, we were told it was too expensive to talk on the phone to our old friends. So, instead we wrote letters. They revealed much about ourselves. I still have a box filled with those letters dating to about 1985. I love being able to read some of those letters today. It reminds me of details I may have forgotten about or missed about my friends. I even have love letters from someone I dated briefly which take me back to emotions that are so sweet to read about and feel again.
Since few people write letters today in favor of emails and texts I feel sad for those generations that will never have this opportunity to savor such distant feelings.
Oh, I also remember that era when calling long distance was expensive. You're right: it is a generational experience I feel so fortunate I got. There will never be an era of letter writing like the one we experienced.
I love the idea of writing letters, and friends and I did try to write letters to each other over lockdown but we sort of got bored with it, or we'd send a text or email in between the letters to clarify something. Then we stopped writing. Also we all noticed our handwriting was a lot worse than it was 30+ years ago when we did handwrite more often.
I will now want to write a letter but I bet I don't.
Interesting. I wonder if you didn't email or text if the letter writing might be more successful and meaningful. Also, I wonder if bad handwriting might be its own strange gift. It is frustrating, I know, but then it does cause us to slow down. A metaphor for how we sometimes have to pause to figure another person out, as we have to do in real life (where much communication is lost, haha).
Thing is, email and social media is fleeting. Ink and paper aren't. My first Masters was about Elizabeth 1 and they only non speculative information was from her letters that were kept as they were seen as history. The introduction was often in Latin or French and the letters themselves were in German.
Later in life working in a bookstore I can across the letters as a book, translated into English and quite disappointing actually.
Thanks for this Grant. I too have saved all my letters and love looking through them from time to time. I can recognize whose handwriting it is before I slip them out of their envelopes. I love the ritual of opening a letter (as you say, a gift) - and still sit down with a cuppa to savor it. The Brits are are enthusiastic card givers, often with a short letter written inside. I still want to buy myself wax and a monogrammed stamp to seal them. And I have a stack of love letters from the year my husband and I were apart before I came to the US. He does too - all in those thin blue envelopes with Air Mail written across and opened with bated breath and an antique silver letter opener.
It’s a lost art. I agree, texts and emails just aren’t the same.
"..To be present in such intimacy, such closeness, despite being “without corporeal friend.” To truly pause and think of another—and of yourself in the mind of another..."
As I "declutter" my life post divorce I ran across a box of letters from my ex wife. Now I've shredded 40 years of sermons and paperwork I no longer need. But this "fake book box " of handwritten letters hasn't been tossed. .yet, for reasons you've stated.
That is essentially the beginning of my novel, "The Letters." A box of letters to a forbidden lover is discovered after the writer of the letters dies. I can't throw out another's words of connection. Letters are somehow sacred to me.
The essence of voice is found in letters. There's nothing truer than a letter writer's voice becoming audible when the letter's recipient reads the words silently or aloud. Thanks for this post, Grant!
Good point. It is a great exercise for developing and recognizing one's voice. I always used to think my letters were my best writing because of that: a letter is where my voice came out.
Oh, Grant. I just wrote a handwritten letter to my middle daughter a couple of weeks ago. She flew out to visit, and I wrote in small script inside a blank card, covering the inner main parts and the backside. I tucked the sealed envelope inside the outer pocket of a large carry-on I was gifting to her, for her future travel adventures. (There's a story about the bag, too).
A couple of years ago, when she left alone to teach in Spain for a year, I mailed her handwritten cards, which reminded me of the letters I exchanged with family and friends, both old and new, back when I joined the Navy in 1992. I kept all of those, and I used to think about where each person may have sat as they wrote, imagining them in each of their homes, and how intimate the words are when the shape of each letter is unique to each individual, some of whom are now long gone. The most important part of our days at sea was mail call.
A little over a year ago, I was going through some old bins, and I came across neat stacks of old letters. Some were from friends back home who were in college, sharing the worries and concerns of young people. Others were from new friends, a few of whom were in the BUDS program, others were stationed in various parts of the world, one I had briefly dated, and then he left for Reykjavik, Iceland (I was in Italy). We were flung across the globe, and it was pre-Internet, so it was challenging to keep in touch. I wonder what became of so many of my old friends, what their futures were like, what happened next?
The lost art of handwritten letters.
P.S. I just remembered this. People used to tell me I had very nice handwriting. I haven't heard that phrase in a very long time.
Love this, Joy. You have your own essay on letter writing here, so you should keep writing it.
I especially love your act of tucking a letter into your daughter's luggage as a little gift to find. Reminds me of when I would sometimes put a note in my kids' lunches. I want to write more "secret" letters like this.
“Secret” letters are ways that we can be right there with someone, when we aren’t. What a wonderful idea; we can re-start anything, any time we want. I imagine a myriad of stories coming from doing something like this.
In my upcoming "flash novel," the two main characters write postcards to addresses of houses they like, without knowing who lives there. Just random postcards sent into the world.
Letter writing is a topic near and dear to my heart! When I was in the Peace Corps (in the 90s), I too went to a coffeeshop almost every day and wrote someone back home a letter. Email at the time was still fairly new, but it was also inaccessible to me. I still have every letter anyone sent, including the many letters my then-boyfriend (now husband) wrote to me. One friend sent the best letters! She'd include comics or random pictures she'd cut from magazines or newspapers, and she'd write weird notes, doodles, or jokes on the back of the envelopes.
These days, I still write real letters and postcards. I send one friend two or three postcards a week even though we pretty much live in the same neighborhood. She's had some rough times and it cheers her up. And I also have a working typewriter! A couple times a year, I type letters to my Patrons. I mail them art every month, but I also love typing each of them a letter because who doesn't love getting real mail? (If I ever have a significant number of Patrons, I might be in trouble! Ha!)
Well, you've inspired me. Later today I'm going to blog about letter writing, and I'm going to get out the typewriter. Thank you!
Oh, I too had a friend who sent me fun odds and ends in her letters. All of these little treats. And ... yes, the envelope (and what might be written on it) was a key part of the letter writing experience (thanks for reminding me of that).
I recently received a couple of postcards from people who live close by, and I was touched by them.
That's so wonderful you type letters!
This one touches my heart. Not only as a lifelong letter writer, beginning in childhood with my grandmother, but one who still has every love letter from every sweetheart, especially those with tear-stained pages . . .and also as one writing historical fiction with hundreds of letters from the mid-19th century to inform her story (though in Danish.)
I’ve just begun a conversation with a fairly new friend about the “instant intimacy” of asynchronous voice messaging. It’s letter writing and even closer — time and space to reflect and compose and edit, but the immediacy of voice.
We are 8 hours apart across time zones, oceans, and continents. I sit with my phone and AirPods on my balcony and speak to him. I’m freer, more emboldened to be more authentic and transparent. And then hours later he’s talking to me from a train in the U.K. responding and extending the conversation.
The voice with the distance is confusing and interesting and much deeper — without the record of a letter that can be archived, but the recording can be saved and re-played. We were wondering if there are studies out there and speculating on whether it is a “false intimacy.”
This idea of letter exchange has me thinking about the collaborative nature and what’s being generated . . . and the similarities and differences with letter writing. 🤔
As always, thank you for giving me much to ponder and discuss.
From my informal survey, it's amazing how many of we letter writers began by writing to our grandparents. My grandmother was my first love in my letters.
I'm intrigued by the "false intimacy" you mention because I've wondered something similar. I don't consider it false, but enhanced. You're creating intimacy in a different environment/landscape--via distance and the imagination. So the imagination definitely plays a larger role in projecting a story and "creating" the other than it does if you see someone every day, but I don't think of that as false. Maybe, in fact, it magnifies the truth of one's intimacy.
Maybe it’s “scary true closeness” rather than “false intimacy” — the paradoxical intimacy in distance. It certainly has me curious and questioning. Thank you so much for this post. Now I’m intent on buying a beautiful set of stationery and collecting addresses. 😉
No. Not “scary truth” — “SAFE” — the distance makes it safe to be more transparent. This creating more closeness.
Sorry for replying to my own reply. 😬. Still thinking this one through. 🤯
Love this: "the distance makes it safe to be more transparent." It probably happens unconsciously. I think there's truth in this.
LOVE those mailboxes.
www.writeradvice.com
Wonderful essay, Grant and yes, it makes me want to write and send a letter NOW!
Let's bring letter writing back!
Oh how I loved letters too.
I still hand write and mail via snail mail all my thank you cards and holiday cards (if I send them that year)
Thank you for your ode! I've begun writing by hand again (cursive) and it's been grounding and quieting. And, it's such a treat to send, and receive, a letter amongst the bills and junk.
I love to think about how writing by hand is "grounding and quieting." It's true.
wonderful post, Grant! Like you, I grew up in the era of writing letters, and because I lived far away from my home country before I learned to read and write — before the age of the www.com — letter writing was a normal mode of communication.
My love letters as a young adult included an exchange with my youngest brother who became an adventurer at the age of 19 and sent accounts of his journeys around Africa, Martinique and beyond... until he unexpectedly drowned in a diving accident. Those letters home became his legacy.
The last (unexpected) letter I received was last month for my birthday from my youngest daughter, telling me how much she appreciates me — heartwarming and precious, far beyond an email or SMS.
The last physical letters I've written was to my grandson who is growing up in the digital age, and receiving a real letter in the actual mailbox of his home is so much more exciting...
My husband and I met writing letters to each other for months before our first physical meeting. I've burnt all previous love letters from 'no longer relevant relationships'. ... to receive letters I've written to someone in the distant past, meeting my past self, feels both intriguing and unsettling...
Letters are so versatile and unique. I sometimes wonder about it as my preferred genre for a book — an exchange of letters with another writer perhaps?
I love your letter-writing history! You should definitely write an essay about this. So many interesting "moments" with letters, especially from your brother to your grandchild. Thanks so much for sharing!
When I was in college and had to do my laundry, I’d lug it to the laundromat and would also be sure to bring along pen and paper. Then I’d toss the clothes in the washer and start writing a letter. At some point I’d need to move the clothes to the dryer. But the 1-2 hours time it took for clothes to wash and dry seemed to always pass in a blur as I sat and wrote. Having these one-way conversations with my friends from afar somehow always lightened my mood, so that by the time I left the laundromat, both my clothes and my mind felt cleansed, refreshed.
Love this story. I've actually heard about people doing this with novel writing--weaving in writing in between household chores and writing while the washer or dryer ran. I'm more likely to do this with letter writing, though, I think. My dryer is broken, so ... I think I'll take you up on this idea.
If it goes anything like it did for me, you’ll hear the dryer beeping and think to yourself, “I wish I had more clothes to wash.”
Haha, love that! Maybe bring your neighbors' clothes next time. Collect laundry in the neighborhood ...
The letters I sent to my grandmother from college got so long she'd say, "I got your latest book." Those letters took days to write, days to travel from Arcata, CA back to Long Island, NY. Phone calls were too expensive, personal computers didn't exist. Was life slower? Were we more deliberate with the way we communicated? These days, when I put a genuine letter in the mailbox, or a stack of Christmas cards, I can't help wishing for a magic mailbox to return real mail to me in equal measure.
I think life was a lot slower. Less congested. More focused. And ... part of writing a letter was in the anticipation of it arriving and then getting a reply. We lived in a state of beautiful suspense.
Love this post! When my family moved from Chicago to one of its suburbs in 1975, we were told it was too expensive to talk on the phone to our old friends. So, instead we wrote letters. They revealed much about ourselves. I still have a box filled with those letters dating to about 1985. I love being able to read some of those letters today. It reminds me of details I may have forgotten about or missed about my friends. I even have love letters from someone I dated briefly which take me back to emotions that are so sweet to read about and feel again.
Since few people write letters today in favor of emails and texts I feel sad for those generations that will never have this opportunity to savor such distant feelings.
Oh, I also remember that era when calling long distance was expensive. You're right: it is a generational experience I feel so fortunate I got. There will never be an era of letter writing like the one we experienced.
I love the idea of writing letters, and friends and I did try to write letters to each other over lockdown but we sort of got bored with it, or we'd send a text or email in between the letters to clarify something. Then we stopped writing. Also we all noticed our handwriting was a lot worse than it was 30+ years ago when we did handwrite more often.
I will now want to write a letter but I bet I don't.
Interesting. I wonder if you didn't email or text if the letter writing might be more successful and meaningful. Also, I wonder if bad handwriting might be its own strange gift. It is frustrating, I know, but then it does cause us to slow down. A metaphor for how we sometimes have to pause to figure another person out, as we have to do in real life (where much communication is lost, haha).
Thing is, email and social media is fleeting. Ink and paper aren't. My first Masters was about Elizabeth 1 and they only non speculative information was from her letters that were kept as they were seen as history. The introduction was often in Latin or French and the letters themselves were in German.
Later in life working in a bookstore I can across the letters as a book, translated into English and quite disappointing actually.
Oh I love the metaphor and makes me wonder how much we do lose by not pausing -whether that is to figure someone out or decide what to write.
I know someone who won't reply to emails straight away so she can think what to write first so .....
Though I am glad it means I can message you and comment on your posts [grin]
Thanks for this Grant. I too have saved all my letters and love looking through them from time to time. I can recognize whose handwriting it is before I slip them out of their envelopes. I love the ritual of opening a letter (as you say, a gift) - and still sit down with a cuppa to savor it. The Brits are are enthusiastic card givers, often with a short letter written inside. I still want to buy myself wax and a monogrammed stamp to seal them. And I have a stack of love letters from the year my husband and I were apart before I came to the US. He does too - all in those thin blue envelopes with Air Mail written across and opened with bated breath and an antique silver letter opener.
It’s a lost art. I agree, texts and emails just aren’t the same.