Rachel Syme on reviving the lost art of letter writing
In 1956, editor William Maxwell had trouble with beetles on his roses. “[W]When I find the fragments of something wonderful in the morning and are scattered by noon,” he wrote to one of his authors, Eudora Welty, “I have murder in my heart.”
Is there anything as intimate as receiving a nice letter or reading someone else’s mail? Yet it is a joy that is endangered in our age of ephemeral phone calls, throwaway messages. New Yorker writer Rachel Syme While in the frantic early months of the pandemic, she was scribbling notes to friends and family, she put out an open call on social media: Does anyone care about a friend? by mail? Yes, about 15,000 people. Four years later, when we spoke, Syme’s ring finger was stained with Lamy Turquoise, the stain coming from one of her prized fountain pens, a Pilot Custom 823, and she had just received one. pack of macarons from one of my reporters, this one. in France.
“The modern world doesn’t have much time for things like this, so I intentionally did it as an anachronism.”
She captured the joy of writing and receiving letters—and the hope of spreading the gospel—in Syme’s scribe (Clarkson Potter). The book is illustrated by Joanna Avillez, is a funny joke about Frost’s original letter writer, a strict 1867 guide to proper correspondence. Accordingly, it contains practices such as describing the weather in a stylish way (we may be in “hibernation” and “ripe time”, but on the horizon: “fertile” , “petrichor”, “bloom”), the art of postcards and looking for pen pal programs, from The Last Prisoner Project ARRIVE Anti-depressant letters. 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 can make someone’s week, month or year.”
Syme also provides many excerpts from outstanding men of letters of the past (among them Maxwell and Welty) and famous works of culture as inspiration, including the classic epic novel Nick Bantock’s 1991 gang, Griffin & Sabine: A special letter. For love letters, Syme recommends notes from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle (“absolute filth,” she told me) or notes between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. There are stories of success in fan mail: Prince’s beloved letters arrived Joni Mitchell, George Clooneyby Paul Newman, by Zora Neale Hurston for Langston Hughes—all of it turned into mutual admiration.
As I raised my personal barrier to entry, “You can change your handwriting,” Syme assured me. And with a new pen in hand, after just a weekend of doodling The agile brown fox… and sent exploratory letters through the mail, I found she was right.
Syme has one ongoing pen pal exchange service called Penpalooza, she started it in 2020, and she periodically puts out calls for registrations via social media. Here, she chats about her favorite letter collections, fountain pen forums, and the urge to connect offline.
Do you have the habit of writing letters every day?
I try. I usually—instead of writing the morning pages like some people—I wake up and write a letter. I’ll wake up my brain by writing a letter to someone, but usually it’s really intense on the weekend. So maybe Sunday night I’ll have a glass of whiskey and sit down to answer emails. I feel like Princess Diana, okay, here we go.
In the book, “take care of your correspondence” is a great phrase.
Tend to your correspondence. Or correspondence hour, as Victorian ladies used to call it, the place where they spent their time. That was a time when women’s labor actually involved dusting and writing letters. That’s it.
Do you remember the first time you felt so excited to send or receive a letter?
