Write More Letters

About nine years ago I signed up for something called the Letter Writers Alliance, an organisation founded to maintain and promote the art of letter writing. I’d been in two minds about joining it, as I gathered that a large part of the Alliance’s activity was conducted on Facebook, and I had, with great satisfaction, closed my account there some time before. Even so, I completed a form and paid a small one-off membership fee, in return for which I was sent some ephemera: a membership card; a badge; and a couple of postcards (one of them shown above). Meanwhile, and more importantly, I was provided with the contact details of two prospective correspondents.

One of these exchanges did not flourish. After a promising initial round of letters with a lawyer in São Paulo, I mis-addressed my next letter by transposing two digits in the CEP (Post Code) which meant that about two or three months later the letter was returned to me, undelivered & unread. I tried sending another after that, but wasn’t surprised that it went unanswered. The other correspondence, however (with a journalist in New Mexico), did develop, and thrives to this day. It’s now my longest-running ‘conversation’ with someone I’ve never met. Even though I didn’t afterwards participate in the LWA’s activities (and wasn’t even aware until the other day that those had ceased in 2020), I remain grateful to them for enabling a long-running epistolary friendship.

‘Write More Letters’ is something I strove to do after moving to my current address, recently bereaved, short of funds, and having a dog and two cats to look after. I thought it would offer a good way of making some strong connections despite my having relatively little free time or ready money to spare: and so it proved. Year on year I scribbled and typed more & more, until, in the pandemic year of 2020, I was averaging close to a dozen letters a month. Since then I’ve slowed down somewhat, but still managed to send about ninety letters last year. Nowadays, with postal services under increasing strain as the volumes of mail continue to fall, while costs and prices rise, I wonder for how much longer the pleasure of sending and receiving ‘snail mail’ will continue to even be an option.