Sunday I began compiling the list of people to send this years’ holiday card, and in between names, thought about what’s happened in the past 12 months that I might want to report on. I always enjoy the look back, although not so much the letterwriting.
That train of thought caused me to peek into my friends Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Wheeler’s recent book, Good Mail Day, about making postal art. A “good mail day” is when something other than a bill or flyer arrives in the post, an actual handmade, hand-written object. And you probably won’t get the good stuff unless you send a few of your own. So they encourage readers to write letters, with an emphasis on creating and sending artful objects. The book is chocked full of ideas for decorations both inside and out, including envelope templates and faux postage. The book’s got a little something for everyone — from the history of the mail art movement to good photos of mail art to project demonstrations to lists of resources.
A bit later, I picked up the Sunday paper, to find a review of Thomas Mallon’s new book, a meditation on the art of letter writing, called Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (which is a companion to his book on diary writers, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries). The reviewer waxes on poetically, and I know I turn first to Mallon’s essays when they appear in the New Yorker, so I’ll no doubt read his book.
And while I’m ruminating on letterwriting, one more tidbit… according to this article “most people use the web to talk to people nearby” and “the volume of electronic communications is inversely proportional to geographic distance.” I must admit I send many more emails to my husband, even when he’s sitting downstairs from me, and to my friends in the Bay Area than to my family on the east coast!