Wanna be pen pals?
A letter on Sundays, and I write back.
Last year I read The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans. It was my favorite of the year, a whole life told in the letters one woman wrote, and it left me thinking about slow communication, and then about a box in my garage.
The box is full of letters my mother wrote me in college, before email and texting were in fashion. What gets me about them now is not what they reported. She wrote down what she was thinking about, what she was turning over, what was carrying her that day, and by the time it reached me that day was already a week gone. There was space in them. Time to get it down. Unhurried, and messy all the same.
I finished the book wanting a letter practice of my own. This is where that led.
So: a letter on Sundays. It is usually a question I am sitting with rather than anything I have concluded, and if I already knew where it landed it would be on the Essays page instead. This is the writing while it is still moving.
And it is a correspondence, not a broadcast, which is the part I care most about. I read every reply myself and I write back. Often enough a reply becomes the next letter, kept in the words it was asked in. Other weeks I am working through something of my own and nobody is responsible for it but me.
There is no sequence waiting behind this form, nothing you click decides what comes next, and you can leave whenever you like. The link is at the bottom of every one.
A question somebody sent me, and what I found while I was answering it.
Something I am reading, and the sentence in it that stopped me.
A thing I made, or a thing I abandoned, and what I learned either way.
An invitation, once in a while. Small live things, half an hour at the edge of a day. They are invited here and nowhere else, inside the letter rather than as an email of their own, and they never go on a public calendar.
One letter, on Sundays.
If something makes you wonder, tell me: it may become my inspiration for the next one.
