Pen Pals and Letter Writing

Stalking pen pal group postings is my new late-night scroll, but I've moved from thinking it archaic to…thinking about it

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Knowing that you read means so much as I continue to weave this written lifeline and, at the same time, explore the contours of recording daily life in an illustrated journal, one week at a time.

Happy Sunday!

A bit of a pre-letter caveat…this post isn’t me opening the door to pen pals. This weekly letter means we already are pen pals!

Maybe some of you should pair up and be pen pals? Who knows! By the end of the week, I had started to think differently about the whole thing.

There is some weaving in the post below, but here are some of the footholds

• Illustrated journal glimpse

• Not a joiner

• Mail slot

• Maybe everyone needs a support group

• Who knew so many people have pen pals?

• Of fog and jam

• Communication shouldn’t be so hard

• Weekly prompts

Thank you for reading.

Amy

“I thank you for such a long letter, and yet if I might choose, the next should be a longer. I think a letter just about three days long would make me happier than any other kind of one, if you please...” — Emily Dickinson

Illustrated Journal Pages from Week 32

A glimpse of the illustrated journal pages (unfinished) from Illustrate Your Week for last week. (I have temporarily scaled down to an A5.)

Excerpts from Week 32 of 2024 (in progress). A. Cowen

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What’s Your Address?

I’m not a joiner. I’m even less likely to say yes to anything one-on-one. And, over the last few years, I am less and less inclined to attend anything in person. The traffic. The parking. The safety issues. Plus, I like to be home.

I could hang that on the pandemic, and on the fact that we had to be extra cautious, but, really, I wasn’t running to in-person events before that either.

I was always a bit of a loner. Now I’m a bit of a hermit. I’m a bit of an island. I’m a bit of a tree in a forest that is on a map that you only see when you zoom in to see that something else in the photo is holding a map, and when you zoom in again, there is something else in the photo that is holding a map, and you zoom in again.

I’m in a forest many zooms deep, well obscured from view. Even I don’t know the coordinates.

What’s your cross street? It’s a question you learn to answer when you live in San Francisco. You can’t order a pizza without providing your cross street. You can’t call for an ambulance without providing your cross street.

What’s your cross street?
The bank of fog bordering the forest many zooms deep, just past the unicorn glade.
Right. Right.
We don’t deliver there.

1. I’ve never been good about checking the mail.

Years and years ago, we visited the house across the street. We had made an attempt to be neighborly. Maybe we dropped a card or an invitation in the mail, an overture that went ignored for a long time. When we finally walked across the street, there was some casual explanation about not checking the mail, and I remember how surprised we were. How could people literally not check the mail?

Gradually, we turned into those people.
There are no traditional mailboxes on my street.
There are no little red flags signaling there is mail to pick up.
The mail is pushed through a slot cut into the house itself, a slot that drops into a metal basket on the inside of the garage, a basket that is almost too tall for me to reach.

For a long time, I avoided the basement. As a result, the mail was checked sporadically and haphazardly. How the problem started, I don’t know, but piles of junk mail spilled over the basket and built up in the floor, a glossy carpet of catalogs and circulars, a collage that grew grimy with grit and droppings.

This summer, I have been checking the mail. Diligently, I am checking the mail. Most days, I get no mail at all. I am waiting on pieces of mail that haven’t arrived. In the early days, there were a few extra envelopes, mostly from doctors who took time to send a card.

These days, most envelopes are white, thin, and clinical. Some hold letters with red print, despite my many calls.
Every afternoon I check the mail.
If the wire basket is empty, I go down again an hour later, just in case.

I am waiting on the mail.

In our attempts to clean in the basement this summer, since I still don’t know how to sort through a lot of the other things, we ended up clearing and reorganizing the front of the basement. We cleared the floor all the way to the mail slot, something I never expected.

We swept up the piles of junk mail. We moved the things that made it scary to walk to the mailbox. It is almost a shock now to turn around a stack of boxes and see the concrete floor in front of the mailbox.

2. One of the first things I did (and it surprises even me) was join a Facebook group for people who had lost their partners.

I did it within the first few days, reaching out for something, even though I didn’t know what. I haven’t engaged there, but I see the posts, and that has led me to notice other groups and really start to wrap my head around the scale of loss that quietly drifts around us, mostly unseen.

• 2,800 women become widows each day

• 1 million women become widows each year

• There are approximately 11.8 million widows in the US
  (Stats from 2022)

(Reminder: window and widower remain gendered terms. These statistics on widows are statistics about women.)

It’s been two months since I joined that group, and I’ve left hearts and “care” emojis in response to posts that are full of heartbreak. I’ve picked up a phrase or two that I found helpful. Such groups become measuring sticks, ways we assess our grief, our movements, our strength. Such groups become maps, check-ins at various month and year markers and on hallmark occasions. Every day posts appear that note the window of time, short or long.

It’s been three months.
It’s been two years.
It’s been six weeks.

Last week…

3. In an odd twist, I started seeing pen pal groups pop up, offerings from the algorithm.

I started looking at the descriptions of the “suggested” groups. Curious, I joined one. Then I started binge-reading posts from people looking for someone to write.

There are dozens of these groups.
People still write letters? I thought.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just text?
Wouldn’t it be easier to drop an email?

Didn’t postage just go up?

As someone with a deep history with letters, someone steeped in the power of the epistolary form, someone who knows what it is to sink into the voice of private letters, my skepticism about pen pals surprised me a bit. I did, after all, look again at book one of Griffin and Sabine this summer, trying to see if it still held the same mystique at this point in my life. And I did check out A Letter to the Luminous Deep because when I pulled it off the new books shelf, I immediately saw that it is a story told in letters.

But the thriving subculture of pen pals has surprised me.

As if peering through a window from across the street, I scrolled people’s posts looking for pen pals, posts in which people identify their interests and put the question out there… “Does anyone want to be my pen pal?”

Lots of people seem to have a pool of pen pals.

“I have two more openings for pen pals….”

People have quotas and thresholds and target numbers?
Maybe they don’t have cable? (They might be trading off the expense and buying stamps.)

I definitely didn’t see people looking for one pen pal, looking to forge a special friendship in letters. Maybe that’s the subtext. Maybe people hope that by writing to a dozen people, they will establish a few meaningful correspondences.

Cast a wide net.

But, really, I get the sense many are collectors. This is a hobby.

I can’t do that, I kept telling myself. I write here. I don’t have time to write letters that won’t roll into this space. I don’t want to split my story.

But I kept scrolling.
I would like to know more about Alaska.
I like those shows.
I have similar hobbies.

But wait, why would I spend time writing that way? Why would I start over again and again and again.

How’s the weather?

I need to keep it all together. I depend on the continuity to stay whole. (I prefer to draw in a single sketchbook for the same reason.)

I bet these people were smart and bought scads of Forever stamps last month.

The worst time to pick up a new pursuit is just after the rates go up.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." — Chinese proverb

I saw people who had been ghosted and people hurt at times by sending a letter to someone that never wrote back. I saw people offer to write first.

I saw people wanting.

I spent time reading these posts, like looking at classifieds, people looking for friends, but friends from afar.

People are lonely in their lives. People are bored. People are disconnected. Is writing to someone a thousand miles away the answer? I kept going back to that question.

Is a letter every few weeks enough to make a difference? No wonder people have multiple pen pals.

• I’m 41, Christian, married, and I like to x, y, and z…

• I’m 25, single, and I like to a, b, c…

• I’m in x country, 36, [condition], and looking for people who will write back…

• I’m z years old, live in x, have 2 cats, 1 dog, y kids, and I like to 1, 2, 3…

• I’m a security guard

• I live in ?? state, and I only want international pen pals…

• I’m married and have x kids and/or y cats…

• I’m single or divorced and have j kids or k pets…

These are generic examples. Posts from people looking for penpals are longer than these lines, but they do follow similar patterns. Key words get thrown in. Posts are nuanced. You (hopefully) know what you are getting into before you agree to write.

There is a common approach of sharing a bingo card on which each square contains an interest, hobby, or potential bonding point. I puzzled over the first few bingo card posts I saw. Is it just a way of showing a set of interests? Then I realized that in the comments, wanna-be pen pals shared their filled-in cards, cards marked with common interests, cards with one or more bingos.

It’s a cover-all! Ding, ding, ding, ding.

The deeper I looked, the more fascinated I became.
All these people write letters.
All these people are looking for connection, or looking for something to do.

I quickly realized that some pen pals care a lot about what the letters look like, what paper they are on, and how decorated they are.

For some pen pals, there is a stationery angle to this hobby. I would probably have to include in my intro that my letters would likely arrive on pages torn from unfinished school notebooks, that I don’t decorate envelopes, that my handwriting is a mess, and that my writing is always a scrawled attempt to catch up with my thoughts. My letters wouldn’t be pretty.

I went from being simply baffled by the whole pen pal subculture to seeing it as something intriguing. I watched videos, mostly from younger people who are very into the “whole package” angle (e.g., the stickers, the envelope, the paper, how color coordinated things are). Lots of pen pals also expect goodies and filler and fodder, things that spill out of envelopes (though not confetti). Stickers and papers and tape are popular.

Then there are the purists, those who are interested in the words. At least I hope they are there. The aesthetic crowd is, obviously, easier to spot.

As in all things, there are groups within groups.

I searched the group looking for certain words, certain identifiers.
There are people of all ages.

I probably do have certain lines I would draw. As I scanned posts and replies, I thought about it. Who am I now? What type of person would I want to exchange letters with? Who do I want to get to know?

With a bit of surprise at how strong the admission was as it bubbled up, I acknowledged that I don’t want a lot of gloss. I am not interested in superficial exchanges. I am not up to a lot of naïveté. I have no desire to smile placatingly through someone’s youth as part of a written exchange.

In this context, specifically, it seems I have some concrete deal breakers.

Based on the high frequency of posts and dozens of replies to each, I’m not sure all pen pal people are, but I think we should be picky.

Cast a wide net, maybe, but I think I would only be looking for one or two that, in the sifting, rang true.

The more I looked, the more I realized I might like, again, an epistolary correspondence. (Well, I already knew that.) At the same time, just thinking about splitting the writing makes me antsy.)

I am a bit puzzled by how people seem to maintain a number of pen pals. It might seem like an organizational exercise, keeping all the storylines straight. Wouldn’t you just repeat yourself over and over?

I worry I don’t have the depth.
I worry I don’t have the breadth of experience.

I worry I don’t have it in me to be exuberant.
I worry I don’t have enough changing scenery to power a narrative.

I worry that no one else would care to read a page about how the fog just drifted across the window and how you can see it and then not see it and look and look and look, almost to the point where you think you imagined it, and in that instant, another sheet of fog is blown across, misty, white, semi-transparent, a film that, for a moment, blurs the trees.

Hello. How are you? It’s been a week since I last sat here to write. The fog today is…

It’s been a week…. Hmmm… some of them are monthly. That might change the dynamic. Maybe they write someone different each week?

4. I’ve always found letters to be challenging in terms of boundaries and borders.

Maybe it is simply that I tend to be all in or not in at all. Maybe I should learn to write about jam, about tea, about sleeping in a room I haven’t slept in in ten years, on a bed that I’m finding less comfortable than the couch, about how my back hurts, about my fear of going blind.

Oh, no, wait. I’m supposed to write just about the jam (but there was no jam). I can tell you that I tried an Instagram recipe this week, and it was a success. I can tell you that the color of the pasta was like a hug, but I still can’t identify why.

Maybe I can tell a stranger that I snuck out the front door to retrieve the roofing permit card from where it was taped to the garage. I was hoping to grab it and sneak back inside, but the neighbor was in his drive.

Maybe he won’t look up. Maybe he won’t see me.

He flagged me, walked over, and said…

“Hey, I noticed that you’ve tied up your fence in the back…” (to the leg of the rusted, unused barbecue grill with a prayer that the falling fence doesn’t pull the grill over as everything slides down the hill).

Yes, it’s falling over. (Some awkward stuff here.) M died last month. I don’t know if you heard.

I won’t tell even a stranger how I cringed when I saw myself on the clip from the security camera that I added to the window and have moved a hundred times, trying to make it work through the screen since drilling it into the stucco somewhere will require both help and commitment. I cringed as I have cringed a thousand times in the last month, suddenly seeing reflections and images and now video clips.

We don’t talk. I scurry in and out. I wave or nod as I pull out of the garage. Over the last few months, I’ve looked out the window many times and found him on top of his roof, which is at eye level with the kitchen window, watering a bunch of potted plants.

“I lost my dad a few months ago. I’m not trying to compare, but I understand. It’s made me think a lot about grief and whether that’s for the person or for the relationship…”

(That’s a paraphrase.)

I do like jam. I like jam, I sometimes think, because my grandmother liked jam. She liked jelly on crackers. She liked jelly on crackers by themselves or jelly and butter on crackers. This is some tiny thread I hold.

“My dad is struggling,” someone told me. A few minutes into this story, he said, “He’s 94,” and my brain fell out of the conversation because, in my world, people don’t necessarily make it to 70.

5. My favorite jam is orange marmalade, which technically isn’t jam.

Orange marmalade sits next to lemon curd, which is also not jam. My most recent jammy discovery is fig preserves, which bring fig newtons to mind, which somehow carries childhood, although I don’t quite know why.

It’s probably been three months since I last had a bite of jam. It probably wasn’t really a jam or even a jelly.

I think I need blueberry preserves.

I am haunted right now by blueberries.

A scoop of a tangy but sweet blueberry ice cream last month was an unexpected delight.

"People, when they are telling you about their life, they are going to find a silver lining that they wouldn't have just found on their own. .... And reading letters from others about their life helps you to contextualize their own." — Austin McConnell video / My Life With 675 Pen Pals

6. Back in the late 80s during the Gulf War, I corresponded with someone in the military. He sent me a series of photographic panels that, when assembled, showed the planet. He sent me the world.

7. I’m not really looking for a pen pal. But watching these people ask for friendship and jump in, wholeheartedly, stamp at the ready, is filling something for me.

What I really probably need is an online support group. I’ve never ever done that, but I’ve been so moved by powerful posts from writers here at Substack who, especially, are writing from within the sober community or from the vantage of other 12-step programs. It’s a circle of built-in support, even here among writers and readers, that is compelling.

8. I sat in the hospital one day, in the chair a bit too far away in an awkwardly shaped room, and said, “I am starting to think that everyone would benefit from the experience of a 12-step group.”

9. I lost my only pen pal this summer. People die and, sometimes, the people you count on disappear.

Sometimes it is impossible to understand the connections, the broken logic, the ways in which humanity fails.

I have a long history with letter writing. I know how important correspondence with someone can be.

I have volumes of letters on my shelves, correspondences between famous artists and writers.

I scanned letters at one point for the Emily Dickinson archive.

The work I was planning to do as a scholar….was…related.

10. I was a letter writer in my school years. I am grateful for a few teachers who received my words and poems, naive, angsty, sad, lonely, and misunderstood as they surely were.

11. There are lots of inspiring correspondences.

There are lots of famous epistolary correspondences, including:

• C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien

• Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé

• Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert

• Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

• Vincent van Gogh and Theo van Gogh

• Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

• Louise Halsey and Maurice Sendak

12. I think we are sort of like pen pals here.

I write, what I guess is an open letter of sorts. You sit down with coffee (or something) and read. It might be mostly one-sided. But I try to leave the door open, and some of you write back.

That is, I think, the nature of the pen pal exchange. We write. We read. We write back.

I received your letter….
I am so sorry (or so happy) to hear (in your letter) that xyz happened. I know it must have _____ you deeply. I was thinking about you as I …
I remember when
Next week
Oh, and I meant to tell you …
I smiled today because …
My affirmation this week is …
I received your letter…
I read your words…
I am holding space...
You give me hope…
I saw this quote the other day…
You won’t believe what happened…
I have been watching this show that you might like…
I want to read this book….
I have been feeling…
I tried this recipe…
I received your letter…

Communication doesn’t have to be so hard.
Every sentence doesn’t have to be a proving ground.
Every sentence doesn’t have to be justified or countered or explained.

Pen pals run on two-way streets.

13. Some guidelines for writing letters

As I scrolled and scanned and thought, some things jumped out at me. Most of these seem like common sense, but here are some things to keep in mind if you are part of a letter exchange:

• Be open-minded. You might find the process more enriching if the pen pal isn't "just" like you.

• Be clear on expectations about frequency. Do you plan to write once a month? Every other week? How often is too much?

• Be careful as you build trust in the correspondence.

• Be cautious of your privacy when first getting to know a pen pal.

• Be mindful of your why. What do you hope to get from the process of writing back and forth?

• Be attentive to details received. Follow up. Ask questions.

• If the "whole package" is a big deal to you, say so. (Look for pen pals who love that part of the experience.) Are you in it for the writing? Or are you really looking for an art swap or "happy mail"?

• Set up a tracker (or a Notion database). Obviously!

14. What intrigues me about true epistolary exchanges, ones that aren’t caught up in how pretty the paper is or what stickers are on the envelope, is the chance to go deep, to be inspired, to be challenged, and to write into spaces that you didn’t expect.

Having written that, I realize that this maybe doesn’t describe a typical pen pal correspondence. I’ve thought a lot about a collaborative writing exchange with a reader/writer, about sharing that kind of exchange as part of Illustrated Life. (There are lots of examples of letter exchanges at Substack, each with their own texture and tone.)

I think a writerly exchange would be a wonderful way to give and receive touchstones for writing and thinking. Responses here in the comments have given me a hint of a back-and-forth that I know would be a springboard, a puzzle, and a challenge.

(I think when the right reader/writer shows up, it’s worth putting a note into the ether, a bit of purple or gray ink, a shimmery mist, and following the thread, casting it, a line full of words, into the sky or ocean. Sometimes you catch a star or a kite or a turtle or a bicycle tire. Sometimes you end up with a fish story.)

I thought that before I was sent traipsing through the halls where I was given a new life badge, one with words I don’t even know how to say most days, and an uncharted map.

Now I know my offering is heavy; the playfulness is tinged. But in me is still the looking, the awareness of the silver thread of gratitude and the way it branches and coils and entwines. In me is still the person in the forest, lantern in hand, stumbling over myself and looking for myself at the same time. (Yes, Emily Dickinson.) In me is still a poet who, really, just likes the sound of the words and the knowledge that they can be twisted in an infinite number of ways, and, with each twist, take on new meaning, cast shadows and patterns of light and dark on the wall.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll stumble over a “wanted” ad in the pen pal group and buy a stamp. (Actually… I found a sheet of stamps when sorting a pile of papers. It felt oddly symbolic, of course.)

(For regular day-to-day check-ins, I prefer texts.)

(I would never write this whole “letter” by hand. You wouldn’t want me to.)

Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Weekly Bits and Pieces

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 33

• Diary List Comics / 52 Weeks

• Paid subscribers: The Orchid Lost Its Last Bloom

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Made It?

Thank you for reading.

This is a risky post. It puts me in an awkward position. I am not inviting everyone to be a pen pal, although I hope we approximate that at times in our exchanges in the comments. I wouldn’t say yes to most things because I can only say yes to something that is exactly right, and I am sorry because I know some people may end up feeling rebuffed. I love the exchanges we have—in the various ways we communicate. I do try to keep up with comments on other Substacks, with comments on your illustrated journal posts at Instagram, with occasional email check-ins, and with comments on the Sunday coffee thread at Facebook. I check in when I know something is up. I reply to texts.

I wasn’t considering a pen pal, but I was considering a writing exchange. Maybe they aren’t that different. It’s all about the voice you slip into when you write a letter, and the voice a reader hears when reading your words.

Let’s open things up in the comments.

Do you have a pen pal? What is that like for you?

If you made your bingo card introduction, what would you put on it (what interests would you want to write to other people about ….or what traits and status markers would feel important to you)?
Are you the fancy paper type? When did you last have monogrammed stationery?
Are you the fountain pen type? What color ink? What pen?
Did you read Anne of Green Gables as a child? (I have no idea why this question popped up . And, yes, I know there are many Alcott fans here, too.)
Have you forgotten more than you remember?
Do you look at your shelves and know you’ve read all the books but have no real sense of what they were about?
Do you eat jam? Or do you eat jelly?
Apple butter? Definitely.
And if you eat jam, what is it that comes to mind when you say that word (which is not a question about jam itself)?

I wish I had been writing someone (or writing here) during the years I think of as the illness years… years that morphed into some semblance of caretaking and navigating the ups and downs of decline. I wish I had realized that the threshold I was never sure I had crossed was a liminal space. I wonder, now, about a correspondence in this time of grief and loss, of learning to move forward. I don’t know that I have it in me to write to anyone…to trust anyone.

It is why I am here. This is my pen pal space. This is the space that catches and holds and catapults my thinking and reminds me to send out fireworks, to light the milk jug luminaries, and to leave the door open for others.

(I think Illustrated Life needs bingo cards! Maybe I’ll do these in November and December for themed months. Here’s a simple tutorial if you are curious about this process in Canva. Here’s a longer video from Canva’s channel.)

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