When you think of your mailbox, what comes to mind? Fliers that head straight to the trash, tax forms and bank statements, the dreaded jury duty notice. Maybe a magazine or two, if you’re lucky.
Most likely, it’s been a long time since you’ve been excited to get snail mail.
But after nearly five years of being a habitual letter writer, Rachel Syme has found that there’s so much to savor that can only come through a mailbox. The joy of receiving a written recipe, or sending delicately pressed flowers to a friend; of luxuriating in the scandalous office drama of a pen pal from across the country, or writing a poetic screed about a nemesis. Syme learned that letters aren’t just a medium of communication, but also a form of art.
After sharing letter-writing tips in newsletters and online for years, Syme packed all of her advice into a book, Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence, released in January. The book is loosely inspired by a Victorian-era how-to guide written by Sarah Annie Frost-Shields, a housewife who published several volumes on etiquette. Syme came across Frost’s manual in 2020, as she was researching the history of letter writing.
While Syme’s version leaves out such dubious tips as “cold water refreshes and invigorates but does not cleanse”, she does offer readers advice on what to collect to put in letters (think pre-wrapped tea bags and Polaroids; but sending “glitter bombs” is close to sin) and how to sharpen their language when writing about the weather (instead of describing summer as “hot” or “humid”, how about “sultry” or “torrid”?). Much of her advice encourages a certain kind of noticing that only happens offline. It’s the satisfaction of picking out the perfect stationery, spritzing a letter with a touch of perfume and finding the perfect way to describe a cloudy day. (Syme favors handwritten notes, though typewriters work in a pinch.)
Letters give correspondents “the opportunity to tour through your curiosity and tastes every time you sit at your desk”, Syme writes. “It also gives you the chance to believe in something, even if it feels deeply silly.”
For Syme, life as a habitual letter writer started in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when she put out a pen pal request on her social media accounts. Hundreds responded, an impossible number of correspondents to manage. So Syme became a pen pal fairy godmother of sorts, matching pen pals around the world with each other using Elfster, a website designed to coordinate Secret Santa exchanges.
More than 15,000 people would ultimately sign up for the project, eventually called Penpalooza.
At the peak of her letter writing, Syme said she was getting 10 to 15 letters a day. Over the years, she’s filled at least 20 shoe boxes with them.
While it’s natural for many pen pal relationships to fade away over time, Syme said she’d heard many stories of pen pals she set up maintaining their correspondence for years. She herself has two ride-or-die pen pals.
“There’s an unwritten rule of a letter, which is that whatever happens in this letter stays in the letter,” Syme said. “Letters give you that kind of permission. There’s an intimacy to it.”
It’s also one of the few things in the age of the internet that feels like it exists outside of time. You can take your time with a letter. The rush to read or reply is removed. The letter is there, waiting for you when you’re ready.
“You’re just getting to know one another, you’re just writing about what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. It’s so low stakes that in so many ways, I find it to be the most freeing way of talking to anybody else,” Syme said. “You’re writing with a goal of a deeper connection with another person. I don’t know that many mediums that have that goal any more.”
To understand the depth achieved in letters, Syme explored the relationship between several writers and their closest correspondents.
Julia Child was pen pals with the book editor Avis DeVoto for most of her adult life, where they shared their dreams and fears, gossip, delicious musings on cooking – and even their thoughts on sex. After reading Peyton Place, a novel about women experiencing their sexual awakenings during the second world war, Childs wrote to Devoto: “Before marriage I was wildly interested in sex, but since joining up with my old goat, it has taken its proper position in my life.
“Those women, stroked in the right places until they quiver like old Stradivarii!” she said about the book. “Quite enjoyed it, though feeling an underlying abyss of trash.”
The writer James Joyce wrote excited love letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle, who he once called “my dirty little fuckbird” in a letter. Jane Austen often sent sharp-tongued letters to her elder sister Cassandra while she was in a period of frustration over her writing. “I am forced to be abusive out of want for a subject, having nothing really to say,” she wrote at the time.
Even though Syme, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is busier now than during the pandemic’s lockdown, she prioritizes her letters. She brings them to read on the subway, and will start writing a letter if she’s waiting for a friend at a bar. And she has made a ritual out of responding to her correspondences, making a kettle of tea, putting on some music and lighting candles.
“I’ve never gotten a letter and have been like, ‘Ugh, another one.’ Never once,” Syme said. “I just get excited to hear from people. I’m an extrovert, I love to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted when I was a little kid growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, staring out of my window at tumbleweeds going by. That’s not an exaggeration. I just dreamed of having so many people that I could communicate with and write to.”
For those who want to try letter writing, you can start with friends and family. Many organizations also connect people with strangers to start correspondences with. Letters to Strangers matches up pen pals with the aim of promoting mental wellbeing. The World Needs More Love Letters allows people to nominate someone in their life that could use kind letters. Some organizations match people with a pen pal from a specific population, like incarcerated individuals or elderly people, who are at risk of isolation or loneliness. Prisoner Correspondence Project and the Black and Pink are geared toward supporting the queer incarcerated community.
Syme warns in her book that at first, letter writing can seem “a little bit silly, a little bit anachronistic, and a little bit melodramatic.
“But also know that your letter, no matter its legibility or coherence, will be met with absolute excitement,” Syme writes. “Whatever you put in the mail, even if it does not rise to the great epistolary heights that you someday hope to emulate, it is still a surprise on its way to enliven someone’s dreary mailbox.”
