Missives, Epistles & Notes: Put a Stamp on It!
Every day, we find a mass of paper in our mailbox: ads we don’t care about, catalogs for that “stuff I’ll read later” pile, or (depending on the political calendar) a few pounds of election-related material. Some of us might still receive our bills as hard copy, and postal mail remains the official channel for many legal documents. But other than holiday greetings, graduation announcements, and postcards from somebody else’s vacation, when was the last time you got a personal letter? That may be a hard question to answer. Written communication has changed dramatically over the past generation.
Origin Story
A quick web search traces the origins of written language to the first Egyptian pictographs around 1900–1700 BCE. Scratch marks on stones couldn’t be taken home and filed, and impressions on clay tablets weren’t always portable. Then came plant pigments and reed pens, which were easier to use. Queen Atossa of Persia allegedly wrote the first letter in 500 BCE, whether on linden leaves or material rendered from papyrus plants.
Over time, writing implements became more sophisticated, paper became easier to produce, alphabets became standardized, literacy became more widespread, and professional couriers evolved into state-run postal systems. The history of written language is long and fascinating, but for now, let’s focus on the art of writing letters. By the 18th century, correspondence had indeed become an art, complete with linguistic conventions for showing respect, and crucial subtleties in writing the street address to honor the recipient’s social standing. Now you had the power to flatter or offend from a distance!
All of which leads us to a brief recollection of my own letter-writing history.
From Chore to Passion
As much as I loved writing once I learned how to do it, I didn’t enjoy sending letters, a task that carried the heavy obligation of a school assignment. Sure, my grandmother would appreciate a thank you note for her gift, but writing it was about as fun as visiting the dentist. Sure, my last-year’s teacher had a good reason for matching me up with one of her current students as a pen pal, but I didn’t know this faraway kid, and what was I supposed to write about? My life just didn’t seem that interesting.
My feelings about written correspondence changed when I was a teenager with dear friends in other towns. Committing private conversations to mailed letters was an intimate, magical sharing, less costly than long-distance phone calls. The summer after my first year at college, I killed time at a boring industrial job by composing long letters to my out-of-state friends. I sat beside a scale to occasionally record the weight of machines and component-filled bins, and my endless writing worried the scale operator. He thought I was reporting him to la migra, when I was really just telling Craig and Ann and Drew all about my summer!
Playing With the Medium
When I wanted to send something that wasn’t just a letter but an event inside an envelope, I opted for creative stationery. For example, I might write on the blank side of a flier handed out at a concert, or the tattered dust jacket fallen off a well-used dictionary. My absolute favorites were desk blotters. I used an 18x24” pad of blank newsprint paper, and after a month or two of jotted notes, calculations, telephone doodles, and tea stains, I would tear off the top sheet and write an epic letter on the back, sometimes with contributions from my housemates if they happened to know the recipient.
There were other letter-writing games. In one case, to liven up routine correspondence with a family member, we built a sentence word by word with each iteration. Their first word was “With.” When I wrote back, my opening was “With hardly.” Them: “With hardly more.” Me: “With hardly more than.” And so on. Over the months and years, this sentence became longer and more grammatically tortured, incorporating punctuation (sometimes after the fact – even then, I understood editing) but never a period. The letter-writing rhythm faltered and faded, but that sentence never actually ended.
When we talk about bringing a playful, conceptual edge to the act of sending something through the postal system, this leads us to the practice of Mail Art, a form of shared expression so idiosyncratic that it deserves its own blog post.
Givers and Keepers
A letter is a gift of words, and gift giving is usually selfless. Yet many writers feel compelled to keep what they create. So do you hand-copy your letters? Photocopy them? Another family member solved this problem with a typewriter and a sheet of carbon paper, and I followed suit. The recipient got an extremely legible original, and the writer got a file copy to archive all those thoughts, feelings, and clever turns of phrase. Years later, those carbon copies became rich source material for a memoir.
Let’s go back to creative writing as an a reaction to tedium. I started my Postcard Project while traveling. I’d find interesting postcards for my friends and describe my experiences or imaginatively riff on the obverse image. Before mailing, I’d copy these messages into my journal (with a description of the obverse image) so that I’d have a record of my travels. Nothing tedious about that. However, a few years later, I revived this practice as a coping method when my job sent me to conventions solo as a booth attendant. To keep it interesting for me, every written message was unique. Some of my friends still remember these postcards, and of course I have an extensive record in my journals. It’s been a long time since that job, but I restarted the Postcard Project as a sanity anchor during the covid shutdown: one unique postcard (sent and hand-copied) every day for over a year. Now that’s a crazy amount of handwriting!
Forward Into the Past!
It was centuries between pictographs scratched on rocks and vegetable ink on papyrus. It was centuries between the quill pen and the typewriter. But only a few decades passed between the five-digit ZIP Code and the widespread use of email. And email is already a bit quaint to a generation that grew up with SMS and social platforms. We can even verbally dictate our written words (with sometimes hilarious results) instead of thumb-typing them. Yet I’d like to believe that receiving a handwritten letter via postal mail is still a special event. Let’s keep the correspondence arts alive and keep those special events coming!
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