In 1956, the editor William Maxwell was having some trouble with beetles in his roses. “[W]hen I come on the shreds of one that was exquisite in the morning and raddled by noon,” he wrote to one of his authors, Eudora Welty, “I have murder in my heart.”
Is there anything quite as intimate as receiving a good letter—or reading someone else’s? And yet it’s an endangered pleasure in our era of the ephemeral phone call, the thrown-off text. New Yorker writer Rachel Syme was in the stir-crazy early months of the pandemic, scribbling notes to friends and family, when she put out an open call on social media: Was anyone interested in a pen pal? Yes, some 15,000 people. Four years later, when we speak, Syme’s ring finger is stained Lamy Turquoise, the splotch a product of one of her prized fountain pens, the Pilot Custom 823, and she has just received a package of macarons from one of her correspondents, this one in France.
“The modern world doesn’t have a lot of time for this kind of thing, so I’m doing it as a willful anachronism.”
She’s captured the joy of letter writing and receiving—and hopes to spread the gospel—in Syme’s Letter Writer (Clarkson Potter). The book, illustrated by Joana Avillez, is a tongue-in-cheek riff on Frost’s Original Letter Writer, a stringent 1867 guide to proper correspondence. Accordingly, it contains such how-tos as describing the weather with style (we may be in the season of “hibernal” and “rime,” but on the horizon: “fecund,” “petrichor,” “bloom”), the art of the postcard, and finding pen pal programs, from Last Prisoner Project to Letters Against Depression. In our increasingly online lives, amid a crisis of loneliness and polarization, sending a note is a refreshingly lo-fi act of connection. “It’s not the worst thing you can do with an extra hour,” Syme writes. “It might make someone’s week, or month, or year.”
Syme also provides ample excerpts from brilliant past letter writers (Maxwell and Welty among them) and culture hits as inspiration, including Nick Bantock’s cult classic 1991 epistolary novel, Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. For love letters, Syme recommends James Joyce’s notes to Nora Barnacle (“absolute filth,” she tells me) or those between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. There are stories of fan mail success: Prince’s adoring missives to Joni Mitchell, George Clooney’s to Paul Newman, Zora Neale Hurston’s to Langston Hughes—all of which morphed into mutual admiration.
When I raise my personal barrier to entry, “You can change your handwriting,” Syme assures me. And with a new pen in hand, after just a weekend of doodling the quick brown fox… and sending tentative missives off by mail, I see that she’s right.
Syme has an ongoing pen pal exchange service called Penpalooza, which she began in 2020, and she periodically puts out a call for sign-ups via social media. Here, she chats about favorite letter collections, fountain pen forums, and the impulse to connect offline.
Do you have a daily letter writing practice?
I try. I usually—instead of morning pages, like some people—I wake up and I’ll write a letter. I’ll wake my brain up by writing someone a letter, but usually it’s really dedicated on the weekends. So it’s maybe Sunday night, I’ll have a glass of whiskey and sit down and answer my mail. I feel like Princess Diana, like, okay, here we go.
In the book, “tending to your correspondence” is such a great line.
Tending to your correspondence. Or correspondence hour, which is what the Victorian ladies used to call it, where they set aside a time. That was back when women’s labor really involved dusting and writing letters. That was it.
Do you remember the first time that you felt very delighted by sending or receiving a letter?
