Old-fashioned letter writing is the new fashion
If you think social media, including e-mail, have driven postal mail out of circulation, think again. Many people, including millennials who rely on emojis to relay their feelings, have turned to handwritten letters and the post office. Some are even using a typewriter in composing their missives.
I rejoice in this return to the handmade and handwritten. I’ve even made the switch from disposable ballpoint pens, which are not environment-friendly, to fountain pens that entail cleaning their nibs after repeated use and refilling the sacs with ink. The names of the ink’s colors are poetic—“rouge opera,” “blue night,” “rose cyclamen”—giving writing that tinge of sacred ritual.
More and more journaling and calligraphy lessons are being offered to young people as well as boomers like myself who haven’t outgrown the stationery craze of our youth. The big malls and department stores have opened stationery sections and/or hosted fairs in their atriums.
Methinks this is a reaction to the virtual reality we inhabit when we log on to social media with trigger-happy reaction emojis and comments. Even our e-mail inboxes are suffused with forwarded messages that go straight to the trash and advertising links to this or that product/service. I spend at least 15 minutes a day cleaning my inbox and still I don’t receive what amounts to a warm-hearted letter.
Very few people I know use e-mail to write something personal. Maybe the fruits of the keyboard are too impersonal. Keyboard work is for fast business communication. The alternative? Go to what worked before. I don’t mean smoke signals, although a personalized phone call sounds good.
There is nothing like a sheet of elegant, textured paper and a fountain pen to slow one down and capture one’s thoughts. One enters a meditative mood. I feel my heart rate and blood pressure stabilizing when I write letters and notes.
I predict a resurgence in more intimate forms of communication, the kind where you have pressed flowers, children’s drawings, bookmarks, or satin ribbons enclosed in envelopes. Even envelopes are being used as “artistic canvases.” Pinterest calls them “altered envelopes.” There one can display one’s calligraphic strokes, do collages, paint or doodle in miniature. Just make sure you leave instructions to the postal worker to deliver the letter to this person and address in the wild growth blossoming on the paper.
When I am writing a letter, my grandchild quietly intrudes and asks for a sheet of stationery. If she knows to whom I’m sending the letter, she joins the exercise, draws figures on the paper, asks the addressee how life is going. In other words, she starts a conversation.
I am reading a 534-page volume of the selected letters of war journalist-novelist Martha Gellhorn. Her editor, Caroline Moorehead, writes that letters were Gellhorn’s “prism through which to filter what she saw and heard, and as a way of keeping close to her friends… Her letters are about the inner life, the excitements of youth and work and love affairs, the toughness of trying to write, the despair and loneliness of old age.”
I often think I am only unburdening myself when I start on a letter. But now and then, I get feedback—through a similarly posted letter or by text. One friend texted, “Your message and letter were like a fresh bottle of Coke after a horrendous afternoon at the office!”
Another time, a friend sent a smudgy card. It turned out she was sipping wine while she was writing. The smudges became part of the letter’s essence. Or, as she put it (and I could imagine her slight inebriation as she wrote): “In vino veritas.”
I’d say my letter writing is complemented by my husband Rolly’s stamp collecting. He doesn’t mind walking from his workplace to the centrally located post office in Baguio City and often paying for my stamp expenses. He knows that when the replies are delivered to our door, he can harvest a few stamps from them.
The in-demand calligraphy coach Abbey Sy, who has several best-selling how-to books to her name, is on to something. Her classes are packed as people eagerly try their hand in perfecting their strokes with a pen or brush pen. My grandchild has a blank journal where she copies Abbey’s fancy hand lettering. I am so lucky to find a young kindred spirit!
———— When not writing letters, Elizabeth Lolarga, 62, engages in freelance writing. She is on a year’s leave from teaching high school literature.