I write letters. I have for years and both regularly to the same people and spontaneously to others and less regularly. For $0.68, to me, a miracle happens: You drop an envelope with a written letter in a box and a few days later it shows up to the recipient. Time travel happens at that point as what they are reading is, most often, a few days old. Then if there's a reply and a conversation starts this way, it's all the better.
Writing a letter forces me to sit down and be present with that person: with my words, reflections and thoughts and how I want to share those with the individual I am writing to. It's not instant, which is why it is so good. Reading a letter is similar: I need to find time and space and a place to sit down and open the envelope and read it.
Love how you’ve said this, Sean. I’ve been sending more cards and letters, including with little tidbits, like photographs of small moments I’ve taken and a special tea, etc..
I recently found out there was a correspondence club in my city and we get together monthly and sit by each other and write and chat. The leader brings cake and tea and some people bring typewriters and we share special stamps and other sundries.
I sent picture postcards to my grandfather after I moved countries. It was a way to have him ‘see’ my life before WhatsApp and zoom existed. After he passed away, my aunt found all the postcards carefully saved in his desk drawer.
I grew up an ocean away from my grandparents and I knew my grandfather best through his letters. We were constantly writing each other. When he died, I went to the funeral and mourned, but the real mourning started when I never received another letter. Oh how I miss those blue airmail envelopes showing up in my mailbox! And talk about time travel- I can still take out a letter and read one now...letters are magic! Makes me very happy that someone else feels this way!
Oh wow. There's a reminder. When my spouse and I were first dating, he lived in Austria and I lived in the U.S. -- those blue airmail envelopes really bring back some memories.
For me as well. I met my husband to be when I was in exchange student In Sweden. I met him only briefly over a weekend. His parents put him on the sofa or in a brothers room, and I stayed in his bedroom for a few days as this was a brief visit. When it was time to take a night train from Stockholm to Southern Sweden and my new host family, I went back into his bedroom and lifted his copy of Walden. I wanted an excuse to mail it back to him eventually in hopes it would start a conversation. So we corresponded all the years I was in college and then married shortly after my graduation. Don’t worry, we did see each other for several weeks before we tied the knot. But I felt as though I knew him really well because of our correspondence. I fell in love with him because of those letters.
My now-husband & I had a long distance relationship for a few years while we were going to different schools, before we got married. There was no email, no texting, no Zoom/Facetime, not even cheap long distance! lol We'd call each other once a week (Sunday nights, when the rates were cheaper), write letters, and fly to visit between terms. (One years, in grad school, we were a two-hour train ride apart and spent most weekends together.) I still have the letters, although I haven't looked at them in years. We'll be celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary next year. :)
I met the woman who’s now my wife in 2019, just as I was about to leave the country for one last contract. Phone calls - and to a greater degree, video calls - feel clinical and cold, especially when transmitted across 10 time zones. So we agreed to write letters instead. Once a week, I’d send an envelope thick with letters through Italy's labyrinthine mail service and once a week, I’d receive one back. We were a world apart but we covered a lot of emotional ground, especially when the pandemic struck Milan and none of us were sure what that meant yet. Those letters kept us sane and kept us in love.
Hear hear! I love putting pen to paper. My grandmother lived to be 100 and for the final 20 years I wrote her a letter every Sunday. She kept them all and now it's a diary of very formative days (but a diary Rated G, for Gramanne.)
This is super. It reminded me that when I was about 7 or 8, I was supposed to write my grandmother twice a month for several years. I don't know what happened to the letters, but it's neat that yours have been kept.
I grew up writing letters to my grandmother several states away. It became a treasured part of many of my friendships and my initially long-distance relationship with my now-husband, followed by a 4-year stint in another country before smart phones were a thing. I am now "teaching" (cajoling, really) my nephews to join the fun and become my next-gen pen pals.
I have a letter from you on a separate, non-work desk that I inherited from my grandmother and on which I have never set a laptop. I love everything about letters, from the sensory experience of the writing, to not having a single other thing nudging for my attention as I correspond with someone. Responding to letters is something I look forward to, and it's such a delight to receive one!
One specific example is my recent move to use my phone spontaneously to call friends and family. While I fully embrace the scheduled call when there are degrees of difficulty like significant time zone chasms, etc., that instinct to set everything up ahead of time had permeated my phone habits broadly (a byproduct of our digital lives to be sure). I decided this works against the very joy of a phone call with one of my loves: connecting across time and space. The act of placing a call randomly shouldn't be a radical act, but it felt that way at first. Sometimes I reach a person at a good time, many times it's a voicemail. But it never feels like wasted effort: I get a happy jolt of connectivity regardless. This might be in part due to the fact I embrace my reputation for the epic voicemail message!
Yes! I started doing this about 2 years ago during my walk home from work and it has really enhanced a lot of relationships in my life. People seem so surprised and delighted that I called Just To Chat. And surprisingly, most people have the time for a 5-10 minute chat.
I also avoid googling things that I'm curious about that I can use as a reason to call people. E.g. I had a question about curling I could have googled but I called my cousin I only see at family BBQs once or twice a year to ask. Or the other day I called my friend to ask if Tori Amos and Trent Reznor ever dated or if I just imagined that in my Lapsed Catholic Fantasy World*.
*If you're curious about decades old celeb gossip: they DID date until Trent went on tour with Hole and prolly slept with Courtney Love and it ended badly.
I also call folks just to chat when I can, but hardly anyone ever wants to talk on the phone anymore. My younger sister calls me a talkin-on-the-phone-ass-bitch with utter endearment, and I embrace it with a laugh. I find scheduled phone calls (if they're not absolutely necessary) to just be so depressing.
I opened this comment section because of my ire for scheduled phone calls. WHY did this start??? It drives me bananas!!! If you call and I don’t answer, that’s what voicemail is for! And then I will call you back when I am available! I know I’m giving “old man yells at cloud” energy but scheduling phone calls solves a problem that doesn’t really exist. And it also puts the burden on your interlocutor to check their calendar and come up with suitable time slots. I’d love to read smart CS’ers thoughts about this phenomenon
My best friend went thru a divorce two years ago, and I started calling her at random times. It’s been so great! We now talk WAY more than we did, and are closer in a day in, day out kind of way that i cherish. So yay for picking up the phone!!
Recently I finished a 15-year stretch of overseas work. A longtime friend of mine noted that we now live a mere 3 time zones apart (as opposed to 10) so she insists we have a good old fashioned friend phone call about once a month. I love this for us. She’s one of those friends I’m sure most Xennials had growing up, for whom a phone call unlocks a sometimes hours-long treasure trove of thoughts, reflections, and hometown gossip. It’s a delight to discover that today, in spite of the availability of more advanced technology, the two of us engage in these calls just as easily as when we were 17.
I love this! I used to have phone anxiety, but a couple years ago started at a new job where spontaneous calls were the norm for the office culture. It took some getting used to, but I’ve come around to how a quick conversation on the phone can sometimes have advantages versus a disembodied text or email. (As AHP writes, it’s about ~discernment~) This attitude has now spilled over into my personal life and spontaneously calling friends and family first felt exactly like how you write—it “shouldn’t be a radical act, but it felt that way at first”! Now it feels like a superpower. The other benefit is it makes my phone feel less like a burden (targeted ads, doomscrolling, social media notification fatigue, etc.) and more like a tool for connection and (sometimes, hopefully more often) joy.
Put so well, Danica! Returning to the essential service of a phone—a technology to speak with other humans—does transform it from a purveyor of doom and gloom into an instrument of delight. Or at the very least, even the score. I realize it's not one thing or the other, but a package deal.
Because my phone is such a powerful piece of technology, I'd lost sight of its core quality. I deeply appreciate that I can deposit checks, conduct diplomatic work business, buy train tickets, edit photos, source new music (and so much more), but I want to prioritize the ability it gives me to place a call. Magic!
I get why people do this, but I hate and despise the telephone. When I switched to a TTY, it made it a little better, but most normal people can't interact with that, so it defeats the purpose. I have my phone on permanent do not disturb. Video calls, voice notes, text/messaging/emails, are my saving grace.
I have some dear friends with whom we've established a norm of random calls just to chat, and it's delightful. They moved away over a decade ago, but we've managed to stay close through visits and calls, almost never digital except the occasional swap of kiddo photos over text. We never know when or where we'll be when the urge strikes to call, but we almost always end up talking at least and hour. It's a treasured friendship.
A few months after we moved to our current neighborhood, we had our new neighbors over for drinks. We talked about our jobs and I mentioned that I had a newsletter. After explaining what it was about (feelings, grief, navigating life) he nodded and looked concerned. Then he asked, “So you just print it out and put it in neighbors’ mailboxes?”
I was so tickled (and slightly horrified) by that idea! But I’ve thought about that conversation often — first, that not everyone thinks of a newsletter as something that lands in your inbox, and second, how different and intentional it would be to deliver my writing to others by hand. I think I would approach it differently, or at least think about it differently!
I’m with you: I’d want that community publication in my physical mailbox. Thanks for writing about this! It was fascinating to consider.
I wish I could have sent this to Martha Stewart before she closed her magazine!! I’m joking but only kind of. I’ve always loved magazines and as I get older I try to subscribe to even more of them, even as they die and struggle. I just really look forward to my magazine time at the end of the day, the ability to toss one (or several) in my bag when I’m traveling, the ritual of dog-earing a page and coming back to it to look something up or save a picture in my “House Ideas” folder. It all brings a real sense of balance to my Very Digital life. There is simply too much on the internet! Slim it down, print it out, send it to me please.
I agree with this whole-heartedly. I subscribe to a couple print literary magazines (The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine) because I like flopping on the couch at the end of the day with a nice drink (iced tea, fizzy water, an adult beverage, whatevs) and picking one up to read... whatever it has in it. It's not something I've researched, read reviews about or "curated" for myself. It's just there, and it always has a surprise for me. Maybe I read for only 10 minutes, maybe I read for an hour, it doesn't matter, and it doesn't require anything from me. There's nothing to decide and no distractions.
I am absolutely in a digital bubble of my own creation. I have always loved magazines and newspapers, but magazines, most of all. I have worked for a few and subscribed too many back in the day. And I was much more widely read in those days because I did not curate my own experience. That was what the editors did! I didn’t read everything and I didn’t love everything, but I loved holding a magazine and reading most of it. It was portable, handy, and did not aggravate my repetitive stress injury. Unlike, you know, phones. I love the Internet, and I love my phone, and I miss my magazine subscriptions. I couldn’t afford them now anyway because I live too far from the US.
A library near me has a basket near the entry where people leave magazines. Not only does contributing to it help me pare down my collections, it introduces me to magazines I never knew existed.
Ahh, this is the feeling I need. I was thinking about something similar recently with video content such as TV and movies: when I was a kid, cable had 3749 different channels, but at least it was just a matter of looking at the three different movies on and choosing which one was most appealing. Now I’ll spend an hour browsing the streaming services before I finally give up and go do something else! It’s too many options and too much choice. I feel this way to a degree with articles etc. too, though I’ve curated my newsletters pretty well and don’t really check social media. That said, I miss that cover-to-cover experience. Perhaps a magazine subscription is in my near future…
I have a ritual to buy magazines at airports. But it's so sad how "thin" they are these days. An US Weekly or People Magazine are one of my favorite pleasures. Now the ratio of Ads to text is so depressing. This is true not just for gossip mags, but even things like Outside or Architectural Digest. So many good writers get/got their start writing for magazines. It's sad to think how many books never happen because money math for longer print pieces doesn't work anymore.
This reminds me of how my mother wishes that stores still published christmas catalogues. There's something cosy about flipping through printed pages that aren't obscured by pop-up ads and embedded videos. Even though the catalogues are still trying to sell you something, the potential commercial transaction is a few steps removed from from what you're looking at.
My 4-year-old great-nephew found a Christmas catalogue his grandmother got in the mail last year, and LOVED it. It was from Amazon! -- nowhere near as thick as the ones we remember from our childhoods, but still a fair number of pages. He spent hours poring over it and made a point of pulling over every adult there, one by one, to show us all the toys he wanted from it. (HINT HINT! lol) That sure brought back memories!
This reminds me that I saved a JC Penney or Sears catalog from the year my kid was born, roughly 30 years ago, so she could laugh about the dated fashion as an adult. But she never got that chance. The catalog got jettisoned when we relocated outside the US. My single mother and I used to love browsing through catalogs when I was growing up and wishing for things. Also helpful for cutting out pictures of furniture and people for the cardboard box doll houses we made.
I didn't know Martha Stewart Living folded. Man, what a bummer. I love magazines too. I get the New Yorker and even though I can barely keep up with a weekly pub, it still makes me feel grounded and tethered to the IRL world to have a physical periodical show up. I just also took out a subscription to Orion, but I think that one is only quarterly.
I agree, I treasure my Cook's Illustrated subscription, even though when I actually want a recipe I look it up on their website. I love tucking the paper copy into my bag and browsing through it in a leisurely way, dog-earring the pages, waving the photos in front of my spouse asking if he wants to try something new. I don't keep them all, but there is just no way that I will ever just browse the website in the same way. The paper copy I eventually read every article and then retire the edition, but on the website I just scroll straight to the recipe.
100% with you on magazines. Had a convo last week with someone a decade younger, and she had *zero* experience of magazines. I cannot fathom my childhood without them. And, now that I think about it, I have probably already always had at least one magazine subscription my whole life. That and whatever the local paper is.
I love this creative discussion about balancing access and intentionality in community building! In a non municipal modality, I love writing postcards on and after vacation. By the time my friends or loved ones receive them, it’s “old news”, perhaps they have seen the photos already! Half the time I don’t manage to get them stamped and sent until I’m home, or maybe even weeks later. I can’t reasonably start a conversation in the shorthand written format, as they don’t have a quick and easy way to respond. Indeed, the charm is that it is so low stakes compared to a text or voicemail that expects a reply. Instead, it’s a way to send a tiny rectangle of artwork their way, with a drawing scribbled on the back, or a silly travel anecdote that I wouldn’t otherwise relate. Something they can find in their mailbox that isn’t saying BUY ME or YOU OWE ME MONEY but instead says hi! Hello! I’m thinking of you, even when I’m far away. A way to say I love you in however many words fit.
We do this too and we also always send a postcard to our pets - now we have a fridge full of postcards from all of the places we've been (which mostly say things like, mama and papa miss you, please be good for grandma lol)
This sentence ---"What if the most sustainable practice isn’t reducing paper use, but increasing community connection and resilience?"---just smacked me in the face! YES! And also you have succeeded in getting me super engaged in the fate of a small community newsletter! Like, whats gonna happen next?! That's impressive writing! Please keep us updated! 😊
I think we've largely skipped this question of yours over the last 100 years and now we're paying the price for it in crises too numerous to name: What if the most sustainable practice isn’t [fill in the blank], but increasing community connection and resilience?
Yes, I love this as a fill in the blank! So often now we've been conditioned by government and corporations that we have to think about everything "at scale." In the nonprofit sector, where I work, nothing is a great intervention unless it can be scaled to serve many more people and will work in every community. And yet, the most sustainable practices are those tailored to each community and serving a certain number of people that want to engage with it. I am increasingly wanting to leave "scale" behind and focus on community connections and resilience, one person at a time.
This really hit home for me - I work in a university setting, and everyone is being sold AI as the future, as the way to scale everything everyone does and because it's the workforce future for our students... and absolutely nothing feels more alienating than that. If something I do has a profound effect on three people because I designed it to meet their needs, and then they tell others about my work and I design something that helps those others because we had a conversation about what they needed, I'm doing my job in the way that feels best and most authentic and that also actually does my job (vs. trying to scale it in a way that, in trying to work for everybody, reaches nobody).
I would favorite this 1000 times if I could. Also the reply below. As it happens, not everything can be optimized and scale up to serve huge numbers. Thank you both for the excellent reminders.
The closest, physical approximation of the Tome I've ever had was the church bulletin every Sunday when I was a kid. One sheet of paper folded in half to provide four pages to work with, it had reminders of events and invitations to volunteer for various activities, and it had a prayer list for people who were sick, or whose loved ones had died. It was something to read when I was small and bored, and then it became ritual.
I think in many ways this newsletter is my Tome now. It is appointment reading - when it shows up in my inbox I open it immediately and dive into whatever the topic of the day might be. I know I will always find it interesting, even if - on the surface - I don't care about the Topic of the Day. (Some of the best reading I've done has been when the Topic of the Day has appeared tangential to my interests, but ends up making me think about something new!)
More: there's a bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books. It's owned by Louise Erdrich, and it carries the most beautifully curated collections. Whenever I'm in town I stop there, because i know, when I walk in, I will find books I didn't know existed, and nothing that will harm me. (Compare this to the Bill O'Reilly books when you walk into Barnes and Noble near Father's Day.) I will find plenty that will make me think hard, and discomfort me, and prod me to consider new ways of seeing and being, but it's all *good*. And this newsletter is my internet Birchbark Books. I might read things that will unsettle my privilege, and convict me, and rumple up my sense of self, but it is all *good*. And I will read beautiful, lush, meaningful things, and talk to people about them in comments, and forward the email to my friends, and talk about it with them over a dozen different mediums (and in person!). It makes me happy.
I am planning a trip with my sister to Minneapolis for the first time next year and a huge draw for me is Birchbark Books! I love Louise Erdich's writing and am so looking forward to it. I also agree about "appointment reading." I especially love getting lost in the comments on Friday afternoons as my work week comes to a close. It feels gentle and connective :)
I finally made it to Birchbark Books last year (I live just outside Detroit) and it was both so much more than I expected AND so much less. Not less like inferior, but less like...just an awesome little bookshop, not a big touristy thing. I get her online newsletter now.
A trip to the Twin Cities in January had several options for sightseeing or exploring for us. The Walker, Minneapolis Art Museum, Axe Man Surplus store and Birchbark. We spent about three hours there and for sure we came home with books and magazines galore. Just there in a neighborhood with a school across the street, a restaurant next door and lots of cute houses lining the narrow streets. Best day ever.
Print is simple and accessible for many in a way that digital dissemination often is not. A course for oldsters was held in my neighbourhood recently. It was 8 weeks long and ended on Monday. I knew about the course because 1-page flyers had been dutifully taped to the entrances of each apartment building in my area. I attended in hopes of making a new friend or two. Yesterday, I called the landline of a delightful woman who I met in the group and asked if she wanted to meet for coffee. She did. And I knew to call her landline because she had explained earlier that she almost never used her mobile.
A single sheet of paper led me to that moment. I am so here for the power of old-fashioned paper. The monthly queer women & nonbinary group I host continues in part because people saw the flyers I put up in the cafe where the meetings are held and in the local library. Some folks found out about the meeting online, but many did not. I hope The Tome survives in print. Good luck, Anne!
I know it's been mentioned here before, but all towns in Vermont have Front Porch Forum. It's a daily email that goes out with posts from residents - about local music, used treadmills for sale, the selectboard meeting agenda, loon nesting updates, etc. You can't really comment on a thing except by posting a response in the next day's email, which keeps most things from snowballing. It's delightful.
That being said, we do have people in town who don't have email, or have crappy Internet, or who (like you) just cannot open another email every day. And as a community member and town clerk, I think a lot about community communication. We have bulletin boards at our general stores and post offices, but our town also contains multiple small village centers, which means driving around and posting flyers in 3+ corners of town to reach folks. And what about people who can't get out much? Our "local" newspapers are in towns 20 minutes north or south of us and each cover a handful of other towns, too. We do still have a couple of local independent radio stations (WGDR and WDEV) that do a great job of engaging with community, too.
I guess what I'm saying is it's patchwork, and it's far from perfect, but we (like your island) are doing pretty well, all things considered?
I LOVE the friction that comes with communication in our 500-person town in Vermont. I found our cleaning lady (and now friend) by going to the general store pizza night and plopping myself down next to a young couple and talking to them. I then recommended her to my neighbor.
Recently she asked me to leave her a google review. And I told her that when I google "house cleaning" in the area, she doesn't come up. In fact, I've never found a service by googling it. I have to go down to the general store and talk to the USPS part-time staffer, look at the pin board, talk to the old timers who hang out in the cafe. I stop by the town office for gossip and recommendations, and I look in the newspaper for fun community activities like live music to attend. The News and Notes is printed on computer paper with clip art and shows up once a month – very useful!
Getting information this way forces me to be social, and I love it. It feels...healthy? Connected? Absolutely wonderful and antique?
I could do without the town clerk forwarding every newsletter and notification that comes into her inbox, but maybe I'll have that convo with her in person. :)
I love this kind of friction too! I recently moved to a small city, and I live in the close-knit, even-smaller historic part of it. When I needed to find someone who could repair shoes, I knew that the best way to find someone was to go to the local coffee shop, buy a coffee, and chat them up about shoe repairs. Sure enough, now I know which guy to go to, and have some funny stories about him as well. It's way, way better than google.
I used to live in small-town Alaska, and we had an email listserv (it was maybe even just a google group) that I set to daily delivery, and it sounds a lot like FPF: the perfect mix of hyper-local news, for-sales, and discussions that very rarely turned sour. I always thought that the community's small size (about 3,000 people!) was key, both in how that naturally limited the possible volume of posts, and in the built-in accountability of absolutely knowing you will soon see everyone at the grocery store (there were only two; sometimes the whole town would be out of eggs; there would probably be a post about it in the listserv—possibly a baker seeking or an egg-stockpiler offering). I stayed subscribed for years after I moved away and still miss it.
Oh, and the tiny local radio station read personal messages on the air each afternoon, sent in by folks from the whole region, often for friends and family spending the summer fishing/hunting with a portable radio but no internet. Beyond amazing.
I was coming here to talk about FPF! I’m so glad we have it instead of NextDoor. Though I get annoyed sometimes that they limit you from casually cruising too many other neighborhood boards, I think that’s actually part of its success! You gotta be localized, you gotta put your name and road name with your posts. It works! (In fact, as I write this I am sitting in a u-haul waiting to pick up a piece of furniture I found on FPF)
The Montana Arts Council puts out a quarterly newspaper called “State of the Arts” that I didn’t even know about until my gig as poet laureate spurred them to ask me to contribute. I love it because it’s printed on something like newsprint, which I desperately miss regular access to. It has an online version too but if you subscribe (for free) you get the physical copy.
Yes, I second Chris on this! This newsy arts paper is a treasure! I contributed a digital advice column to them what seems like a 100 years ago. I'm from MT by not there now, but I maintain and appreciate that how that subscription keeps me connected.
This supports my pet theory that data driven decision making is actually ruining everything. I loved your point about consultants would probably reach the same conclusion, but it's so hard to quantify the value of something when the cost is more in your face. Can't we do things because we like them even though they might not have a metric that supports their value?
An in person thing I discovered this year that feel so wonderfully connective:
There’s a local artist who hosts monthly “letter writing nights”. There’s a loose collection of people who go regularly, but it’s very welcoming and there’s new people there every time. People share stamps and sundries and conversation and there’s always tea and cake. It’s inspired me to write a lot more cards and letters, and I’m touched by how cherished my friends feel who receive them. I’ve also started exchanging cards with people who go to the meeting. Very dear to receive!
I cannot recommend it more, Zoe, yay. You just need a space with a big enough table for people to sit around and I can highly recommend bringing tea and cake. It makes it feel so much more festive and dear.
This gal (@squeezeboxpress) does it on the last Monday of the month so there’s some sort of regular rhythm which is nice. They’re really friendly and relaxed with new people which keeps it from ever feeling “clubby”.
They cross pollinate with other mail oriented groups to get the word out such as a mail/stamp art club. I hadn’t realized there was a whole ecosystem of people who gather and connect this way but it’s very dear and makes sense!
What is this magical realm you live in with an abundance of "other mail oriented groups" ?! I love this and am seriously thinking about making something like it happen. And YES re: tea and cake. I would love an excuse to make a monthly cake (and not immediately eat it all myself).
ahh, yes, could not agree about Shared monthly cake. Feels like a little hedgehog-cottage plan. I am in Oregon where there is so much sweet funky artistic tender little tendrils amidst it all the modern community challenges here too. and, i think there will be kindreds for this about anywhere based on the mail art/correspondence things I've learned about via instagram that seem to be around the world ;). For our local folks, you could take a look @pdx_correspondence_coop and @learedmond who is all @wsps_postmaster and hopefully that might start to draw you into the broader mail kindred network. Woohoo!
The other day I spent over an hour on the phone with my best friend just going through our high school year book together. In the back the yearbook publisher had this insert that referenced current trends or newsworthy events that happened over the course of a school year. We were dying laughing over how ridiculous and sometimes dark it was.
I also like cleaning my house while talking to someone. The few times a year I call my mom to be a dutiful daughter, I call it putting on a Momcast. I let her rip and an hour later I've cleaned my whole house.
Momcast! It is absolutely the case for me too. It's been bugging me for years that she is broadcast-only on the phone. It's not a conversation! But I have to get over it. At least now I have a great word for it! And maybe a clean house!
I’ve become so bored of consuming everything digitally. Everything has the same feeling, whether it’s where to watch a movie or reading a touching personal story. I have started returning to physical books and magazines purely for the physical variety of it. I suppose my Tome is the Society of Authors’ quarterly magazine. I wouldn’t click many of the headings if I saw them online but I read it avidly to see what drama is afoot in the world of translation or how someone got burned by using a copyrighted photo in their blog about birdwatching. Why not - I scroll for entertainment and this is as good a way to pass the time as any. At least it adds texture to my consumption.
I really want my parasocial relationships to be in-person now. To that end, I got off Facebook finally, and joined a gay fiber arts guild that meets bi-weekly. Looking for a community garden to volunteer at. Plans to go see the Rollin' Homos (a queer skating group) soon + try a Capoeira class.
I write letters. I have for years and both regularly to the same people and spontaneously to others and less regularly. For $0.68, to me, a miracle happens: You drop an envelope with a written letter in a box and a few days later it shows up to the recipient. Time travel happens at that point as what they are reading is, most often, a few days old. Then if there's a reply and a conversation starts this way, it's all the better.
Writing a letter forces me to sit down and be present with that person: with my words, reflections and thoughts and how I want to share those with the individual I am writing to. It's not instant, which is why it is so good. Reading a letter is similar: I need to find time and space and a place to sit down and open the envelope and read it.
Simply wonderful.
Love how you’ve said this, Sean. I’ve been sending more cards and letters, including with little tidbits, like photographs of small moments I’ve taken and a special tea, etc..
I recently found out there was a correspondence club in my city and we get together monthly and sit by each other and write and chat. The leader brings cake and tea and some people bring typewriters and we share special stamps and other sundries.
I sent picture postcards to my grandfather after I moved countries. It was a way to have him ‘see’ my life before WhatsApp and zoom existed. After he passed away, my aunt found all the postcards carefully saved in his desk drawer.
Dee, this is ever so tender and moving. I love that you did this and how deeply dear it must have been to see his careful, loving storage.
Thank you. A correspondence club sounds wonderful . . . .
It really is. I’m so grateful for it.
Ooh, I had no idea such a thing existed. Perhaps I might start one. Either way, I am thrilled to make this new discovery. Thank you!
I grew up an ocean away from my grandparents and I knew my grandfather best through his letters. We were constantly writing each other. When he died, I went to the funeral and mourned, but the real mourning started when I never received another letter. Oh how I miss those blue airmail envelopes showing up in my mailbox! And talk about time travel- I can still take out a letter and read one now...letters are magic! Makes me very happy that someone else feels this way!
Oh wow. There's a reminder. When my spouse and I were first dating, he lived in Austria and I lived in the U.S. -- those blue airmail envelopes really bring back some memories.
For me as well. I met my husband to be when I was in exchange student In Sweden. I met him only briefly over a weekend. His parents put him on the sofa or in a brothers room, and I stayed in his bedroom for a few days as this was a brief visit. When it was time to take a night train from Stockholm to Southern Sweden and my new host family, I went back into his bedroom and lifted his copy of Walden. I wanted an excuse to mail it back to him eventually in hopes it would start a conversation. So we corresponded all the years I was in college and then married shortly after my graduation. Don’t worry, we did see each other for several weeks before we tied the knot. But I felt as though I knew him really well because of our correspondence. I fell in love with him because of those letters.
I love that you swiped a book to further a relationship!
Thanks! It never occurred to me that it would actually work.
🦹♀️
My now-husband & I had a long distance relationship for a few years while we were going to different schools, before we got married. There was no email, no texting, no Zoom/Facetime, not even cheap long distance! lol We'd call each other once a week (Sunday nights, when the rates were cheaper), write letters, and fly to visit between terms. (One years, in grad school, we were a two-hour train ride apart and spent most weekends together.) I still have the letters, although I haven't looked at them in years. We'll be celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary next year. :)
Congratulations! I remember those years. My phone bill was staggering as well.
So beautiful.
The blue air-mail envelopes! I had forgotten about those - wow! I'm glad you had that correspondence with your grandfather . . .
I met the woman who’s now my wife in 2019, just as I was about to leave the country for one last contract. Phone calls - and to a greater degree, video calls - feel clinical and cold, especially when transmitted across 10 time zones. So we agreed to write letters instead. Once a week, I’d send an envelope thick with letters through Italy's labyrinthine mail service and once a week, I’d receive one back. We were a world apart but we covered a lot of emotional ground, especially when the pandemic struck Milan and none of us were sure what that meant yet. Those letters kept us sane and kept us in love.
This is so great. I hope you both have kept all of those letters - what a time to be writing, for sure.
Hear hear! I love putting pen to paper. My grandmother lived to be 100 and for the final 20 years I wrote her a letter every Sunday. She kept them all and now it's a diary of very formative days (but a diary Rated G, for Gramanne.)
This is super. It reminded me that when I was about 7 or 8, I was supposed to write my grandmother twice a month for several years. I don't know what happened to the letters, but it's neat that yours have been kept.
I love this perspective! And this “time travel happens” when they’re reading it. Never thought of it that way but so true. I aspire to do this more.
I grew up writing letters to my grandmother several states away. It became a treasured part of many of my friendships and my initially long-distance relationship with my now-husband, followed by a 4-year stint in another country before smart phones were a thing. I am now "teaching" (cajoling, really) my nephews to join the fun and become my next-gen pen pals.
I have a letter from you on a separate, non-work desk that I inherited from my grandmother and on which I have never set a laptop. I love everything about letters, from the sensory experience of the writing, to not having a single other thing nudging for my attention as I correspond with someone. Responding to letters is something I look forward to, and it's such a delight to receive one!
Yay! There is something about a desk and/or a special writing place that really speaks to me. Glad you have that!
One specific example is my recent move to use my phone spontaneously to call friends and family. While I fully embrace the scheduled call when there are degrees of difficulty like significant time zone chasms, etc., that instinct to set everything up ahead of time had permeated my phone habits broadly (a byproduct of our digital lives to be sure). I decided this works against the very joy of a phone call with one of my loves: connecting across time and space. The act of placing a call randomly shouldn't be a radical act, but it felt that way at first. Sometimes I reach a person at a good time, many times it's a voicemail. But it never feels like wasted effort: I get a happy jolt of connectivity regardless. This might be in part due to the fact I embrace my reputation for the epic voicemail message!
Yes! I started doing this about 2 years ago during my walk home from work and it has really enhanced a lot of relationships in my life. People seem so surprised and delighted that I called Just To Chat. And surprisingly, most people have the time for a 5-10 minute chat.
I also avoid googling things that I'm curious about that I can use as a reason to call people. E.g. I had a question about curling I could have googled but I called my cousin I only see at family BBQs once or twice a year to ask. Or the other day I called my friend to ask if Tori Amos and Trent Reznor ever dated or if I just imagined that in my Lapsed Catholic Fantasy World*.
*If you're curious about decades old celeb gossip: they DID date until Trent went on tour with Hole and prolly slept with Courtney Love and it ended badly.
I also call folks just to chat when I can, but hardly anyone ever wants to talk on the phone anymore. My younger sister calls me a talkin-on-the-phone-ass-bitch with utter endearment, and I embrace it with a laugh. I find scheduled phone calls (if they're not absolutely necessary) to just be so depressing.
TOTPAB!
Yes to calling my folks whenever the notion strikes me: I will never get to speak to them enough and I know it. So seizing that moment is profound.
I opened this comment section because of my ire for scheduled phone calls. WHY did this start??? It drives me bananas!!! If you call and I don’t answer, that’s what voicemail is for! And then I will call you back when I am available! I know I’m giving “old man yells at cloud” energy but scheduling phone calls solves a problem that doesn’t really exist. And it also puts the burden on your interlocutor to check their calendar and come up with suitable time slots. I’d love to read smart CS’ers thoughts about this phenomenon
I've always been irked by scheduled phone calls and you just articulated EXACTLY why it irks me. Thank you!
This delicious detail about Trent/Tori/Courtney is fantastic: thank you!
I *love* the idea of "phone a friend or family" instead of Google—brilliant.
My best friend went thru a divorce two years ago, and I started calling her at random times. It’s been so great! We now talk WAY more than we did, and are closer in a day in, day out kind of way that i cherish. So yay for picking up the phone!!
I can only imagine how grateful she is for that outreach on your part, Ellen. And what's even better, it's a win-win for you both!
Recently I finished a 15-year stretch of overseas work. A longtime friend of mine noted that we now live a mere 3 time zones apart (as opposed to 10) so she insists we have a good old fashioned friend phone call about once a month. I love this for us. She’s one of those friends I’m sure most Xennials had growing up, for whom a phone call unlocks a sometimes hours-long treasure trove of thoughts, reflections, and hometown gossip. It’s a delight to discover that today, in spite of the availability of more advanced technology, the two of us engage in these calls just as easily as when we were 17.
I have one friend who is a phone-call-only friend - we text infrequently, but when we get on the phone it's a two hour marathon. I love that!
I love this! I used to have phone anxiety, but a couple years ago started at a new job where spontaneous calls were the norm for the office culture. It took some getting used to, but I’ve come around to how a quick conversation on the phone can sometimes have advantages versus a disembodied text or email. (As AHP writes, it’s about ~discernment~) This attitude has now spilled over into my personal life and spontaneously calling friends and family first felt exactly like how you write—it “shouldn’t be a radical act, but it felt that way at first”! Now it feels like a superpower. The other benefit is it makes my phone feel less like a burden (targeted ads, doomscrolling, social media notification fatigue, etc.) and more like a tool for connection and (sometimes, hopefully more often) joy.
Put so well, Danica! Returning to the essential service of a phone—a technology to speak with other humans—does transform it from a purveyor of doom and gloom into an instrument of delight. Or at the very least, even the score. I realize it's not one thing or the other, but a package deal.
Because my phone is such a powerful piece of technology, I'd lost sight of its core quality. I deeply appreciate that I can deposit checks, conduct diplomatic work business, buy train tickets, edit photos, source new music (and so much more), but I want to prioritize the ability it gives me to place a call. Magic!
I get why people do this, but I hate and despise the telephone. When I switched to a TTY, it made it a little better, but most normal people can't interact with that, so it defeats the purpose. I have my phone on permanent do not disturb. Video calls, voice notes, text/messaging/emails, are my saving grace.
This makes great sense: my voicemails are for you!
SAME. I am not great at responding to texts; I am great at the spontaneous phone call!
I have some dear friends with whom we've established a norm of random calls just to chat, and it's delightful. They moved away over a decade ago, but we've managed to stay close through visits and calls, almost never digital except the occasional swap of kiddo photos over text. We never know when or where we'll be when the urge strikes to call, but we almost always end up talking at least and hour. It's a treasured friendship.
A few months after we moved to our current neighborhood, we had our new neighbors over for drinks. We talked about our jobs and I mentioned that I had a newsletter. After explaining what it was about (feelings, grief, navigating life) he nodded and looked concerned. Then he asked, “So you just print it out and put it in neighbors’ mailboxes?”
I was so tickled (and slightly horrified) by that idea! But I’ve thought about that conversation often — first, that not everyone thinks of a newsletter as something that lands in your inbox, and second, how different and intentional it would be to deliver my writing to others by hand. I think I would approach it differently, or at least think about it differently!
I’m with you: I’d want that community publication in my physical mailbox. Thanks for writing about this! It was fascinating to consider.
I wish I could have sent this to Martha Stewart before she closed her magazine!! I’m joking but only kind of. I’ve always loved magazines and as I get older I try to subscribe to even more of them, even as they die and struggle. I just really look forward to my magazine time at the end of the day, the ability to toss one (or several) in my bag when I’m traveling, the ritual of dog-earing a page and coming back to it to look something up or save a picture in my “House Ideas” folder. It all brings a real sense of balance to my Very Digital life. There is simply too much on the internet! Slim it down, print it out, send it to me please.
I agree with this whole-heartedly. I subscribe to a couple print literary magazines (The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine) because I like flopping on the couch at the end of the day with a nice drink (iced tea, fizzy water, an adult beverage, whatevs) and picking one up to read... whatever it has in it. It's not something I've researched, read reviews about or "curated" for myself. It's just there, and it always has a surprise for me. Maybe I read for only 10 minutes, maybe I read for an hour, it doesn't matter, and it doesn't require anything from me. There's nothing to decide and no distractions.
I am absolutely in a digital bubble of my own creation. I have always loved magazines and newspapers, but magazines, most of all. I have worked for a few and subscribed too many back in the day. And I was much more widely read in those days because I did not curate my own experience. That was what the editors did! I didn’t read everything and I didn’t love everything, but I loved holding a magazine and reading most of it. It was portable, handy, and did not aggravate my repetitive stress injury. Unlike, you know, phones. I love the Internet, and I love my phone, and I miss my magazine subscriptions. I couldn’t afford them now anyway because I live too far from the US.
A library near me has a basket near the entry where people leave magazines. Not only does contributing to it help me pare down my collections, it introduces me to magazines I never knew existed.
Ahh, this is the feeling I need. I was thinking about something similar recently with video content such as TV and movies: when I was a kid, cable had 3749 different channels, but at least it was just a matter of looking at the three different movies on and choosing which one was most appealing. Now I’ll spend an hour browsing the streaming services before I finally give up and go do something else! It’s too many options and too much choice. I feel this way to a degree with articles etc. too, though I’ve curated my newsletters pretty well and don’t really check social media. That said, I miss that cover-to-cover experience. Perhaps a magazine subscription is in my near future…
I have a ritual to buy magazines at airports. But it's so sad how "thin" they are these days. An US Weekly or People Magazine are one of my favorite pleasures. Now the ratio of Ads to text is so depressing. This is true not just for gossip mags, but even things like Outside or Architectural Digest. So many good writers get/got their start writing for magazines. It's sad to think how many books never happen because money math for longer print pieces doesn't work anymore.
This reminds me of how my mother wishes that stores still published christmas catalogues. There's something cosy about flipping through printed pages that aren't obscured by pop-up ads and embedded videos. Even though the catalogues are still trying to sell you something, the potential commercial transaction is a few steps removed from from what you're looking at.
My 4-year-old great-nephew found a Christmas catalogue his grandmother got in the mail last year, and LOVED it. It was from Amazon! -- nowhere near as thick as the ones we remember from our childhoods, but still a fair number of pages. He spent hours poring over it and made a point of pulling over every adult there, one by one, to show us all the toys he wanted from it. (HINT HINT! lol) That sure brought back memories!
This reminds me that I saved a JC Penney or Sears catalog from the year my kid was born, roughly 30 years ago, so she could laugh about the dated fashion as an adult. But she never got that chance. The catalog got jettisoned when we relocated outside the US. My single mother and I used to love browsing through catalogs when I was growing up and wishing for things. Also helpful for cutting out pictures of furniture and people for the cardboard box doll houses we made.
I didn't know Martha Stewart Living folded. Man, what a bummer. I love magazines too. I get the New Yorker and even though I can barely keep up with a weekly pub, it still makes me feel grounded and tethered to the IRL world to have a physical periodical show up. I just also took out a subscription to Orion, but I think that one is only quarterly.
I agree, I treasure my Cook's Illustrated subscription, even though when I actually want a recipe I look it up on their website. I love tucking the paper copy into my bag and browsing through it in a leisurely way, dog-earring the pages, waving the photos in front of my spouse asking if he wants to try something new. I don't keep them all, but there is just no way that I will ever just browse the website in the same way. The paper copy I eventually read every article and then retire the edition, but on the website I just scroll straight to the recipe.
100% with you on magazines. Had a convo last week with someone a decade younger, and she had *zero* experience of magazines. I cannot fathom my childhood without them. And, now that I think about it, I have probably already always had at least one magazine subscription my whole life. That and whatever the local paper is.
I love this creative discussion about balancing access and intentionality in community building! In a non municipal modality, I love writing postcards on and after vacation. By the time my friends or loved ones receive them, it’s “old news”, perhaps they have seen the photos already! Half the time I don’t manage to get them stamped and sent until I’m home, or maybe even weeks later. I can’t reasonably start a conversation in the shorthand written format, as they don’t have a quick and easy way to respond. Indeed, the charm is that it is so low stakes compared to a text or voicemail that expects a reply. Instead, it’s a way to send a tiny rectangle of artwork their way, with a drawing scribbled on the back, or a silly travel anecdote that I wouldn’t otherwise relate. Something they can find in their mailbox that isn’t saying BUY ME or YOU OWE ME MONEY but instead says hi! Hello! I’m thinking of you, even when I’m far away. A way to say I love you in however many words fit.
I have friends that regularly send postcards from their travels but also, just from around local places they visit. It's ALWAYS a delight to receive.
We do this too and we also always send a postcard to our pets - now we have a fridge full of postcards from all of the places we've been (which mostly say things like, mama and papa miss you, please be good for grandma lol)
this is genius!
This sentence ---"What if the most sustainable practice isn’t reducing paper use, but increasing community connection and resilience?"---just smacked me in the face! YES! And also you have succeeded in getting me super engaged in the fate of a small community newsletter! Like, whats gonna happen next?! That's impressive writing! Please keep us updated! 😊
I think we've largely skipped this question of yours over the last 100 years and now we're paying the price for it in crises too numerous to name: What if the most sustainable practice isn’t [fill in the blank], but increasing community connection and resilience?
Yes, I love this as a fill in the blank! So often now we've been conditioned by government and corporations that we have to think about everything "at scale." In the nonprofit sector, where I work, nothing is a great intervention unless it can be scaled to serve many more people and will work in every community. And yet, the most sustainable practices are those tailored to each community and serving a certain number of people that want to engage with it. I am increasingly wanting to leave "scale" behind and focus on community connections and resilience, one person at a time.
This really hit home for me - I work in a university setting, and everyone is being sold AI as the future, as the way to scale everything everyone does and because it's the workforce future for our students... and absolutely nothing feels more alienating than that. If something I do has a profound effect on three people because I designed it to meet their needs, and then they tell others about my work and I design something that helps those others because we had a conversation about what they needed, I'm doing my job in the way that feels best and most authentic and that also actually does my job (vs. trying to scale it in a way that, in trying to work for everybody, reaches nobody).
I would favorite this 1000 times if I could. Also the reply below. As it happens, not everything can be optimized and scale up to serve huge numbers. Thank you both for the excellent reminders.
The closest, physical approximation of the Tome I've ever had was the church bulletin every Sunday when I was a kid. One sheet of paper folded in half to provide four pages to work with, it had reminders of events and invitations to volunteer for various activities, and it had a prayer list for people who were sick, or whose loved ones had died. It was something to read when I was small and bored, and then it became ritual.
I think in many ways this newsletter is my Tome now. It is appointment reading - when it shows up in my inbox I open it immediately and dive into whatever the topic of the day might be. I know I will always find it interesting, even if - on the surface - I don't care about the Topic of the Day. (Some of the best reading I've done has been when the Topic of the Day has appeared tangential to my interests, but ends up making me think about something new!)
More: there's a bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books. It's owned by Louise Erdrich, and it carries the most beautifully curated collections. Whenever I'm in town I stop there, because i know, when I walk in, I will find books I didn't know existed, and nothing that will harm me. (Compare this to the Bill O'Reilly books when you walk into Barnes and Noble near Father's Day.) I will find plenty that will make me think hard, and discomfort me, and prod me to consider new ways of seeing and being, but it's all *good*. And this newsletter is my internet Birchbark Books. I might read things that will unsettle my privilege, and convict me, and rumple up my sense of self, but it is all *good*. And I will read beautiful, lush, meaningful things, and talk to people about them in comments, and forward the email to my friends, and talk about it with them over a dozen different mediums (and in person!). It makes me happy.
I am planning a trip with my sister to Minneapolis for the first time next year and a huge draw for me is Birchbark Books! I love Louise Erdich's writing and am so looking forward to it. I also agree about "appointment reading." I especially love getting lost in the comments on Friday afternoons as my work week comes to a close. It feels gentle and connective :)
I love Birchbark so much! Be prepared to haul back a ton of books!
I finally made it to Birchbark Books last year (I live just outside Detroit) and it was both so much more than I expected AND so much less. Not less like inferior, but less like...just an awesome little bookshop, not a big touristy thing. I get her online newsletter now.
Yes, it's very much a neighborhood bookstore! I can totally appreciate how that would be kind of surprising.
A trip to the Twin Cities in January had several options for sightseeing or exploring for us. The Walker, Minneapolis Art Museum, Axe Man Surplus store and Birchbark. We spent about three hours there and for sure we came home with books and magazines galore. Just there in a neighborhood with a school across the street, a restaurant next door and lots of cute houses lining the narrow streets. Best day ever.
Print is simple and accessible for many in a way that digital dissemination often is not. A course for oldsters was held in my neighbourhood recently. It was 8 weeks long and ended on Monday. I knew about the course because 1-page flyers had been dutifully taped to the entrances of each apartment building in my area. I attended in hopes of making a new friend or two. Yesterday, I called the landline of a delightful woman who I met in the group and asked if she wanted to meet for coffee. She did. And I knew to call her landline because she had explained earlier that she almost never used her mobile.
A single sheet of paper led me to that moment. I am so here for the power of old-fashioned paper. The monthly queer women & nonbinary group I host continues in part because people saw the flyers I put up in the cafe where the meetings are held and in the local library. Some folks found out about the meeting online, but many did not. I hope The Tome survives in print. Good luck, Anne!
This is so lovely!
I know it's been mentioned here before, but all towns in Vermont have Front Porch Forum. It's a daily email that goes out with posts from residents - about local music, used treadmills for sale, the selectboard meeting agenda, loon nesting updates, etc. You can't really comment on a thing except by posting a response in the next day's email, which keeps most things from snowballing. It's delightful.
That being said, we do have people in town who don't have email, or have crappy Internet, or who (like you) just cannot open another email every day. And as a community member and town clerk, I think a lot about community communication. We have bulletin boards at our general stores and post offices, but our town also contains multiple small village centers, which means driving around and posting flyers in 3+ corners of town to reach folks. And what about people who can't get out much? Our "local" newspapers are in towns 20 minutes north or south of us and each cover a handful of other towns, too. We do still have a couple of local independent radio stations (WGDR and WDEV) that do a great job of engaging with community, too.
I guess what I'm saying is it's patchwork, and it's far from perfect, but we (like your island) are doing pretty well, all things considered?
I LOVE the friction that comes with communication in our 500-person town in Vermont. I found our cleaning lady (and now friend) by going to the general store pizza night and plopping myself down next to a young couple and talking to them. I then recommended her to my neighbor.
Recently she asked me to leave her a google review. And I told her that when I google "house cleaning" in the area, she doesn't come up. In fact, I've never found a service by googling it. I have to go down to the general store and talk to the USPS part-time staffer, look at the pin board, talk to the old timers who hang out in the cafe. I stop by the town office for gossip and recommendations, and I look in the newspaper for fun community activities like live music to attend. The News and Notes is printed on computer paper with clip art and shows up once a month – very useful!
Getting information this way forces me to be social, and I love it. It feels...healthy? Connected? Absolutely wonderful and antique?
I could do without the town clerk forwarding every newsletter and notification that comes into her inbox, but maybe I'll have that convo with her in person. :)
I love this kind of friction too! I recently moved to a small city, and I live in the close-knit, even-smaller historic part of it. When I needed to find someone who could repair shoes, I knew that the best way to find someone was to go to the local coffee shop, buy a coffee, and chat them up about shoe repairs. Sure enough, now I know which guy to go to, and have some funny stories about him as well. It's way, way better than google.
I used to live in small-town Alaska, and we had an email listserv (it was maybe even just a google group) that I set to daily delivery, and it sounds a lot like FPF: the perfect mix of hyper-local news, for-sales, and discussions that very rarely turned sour. I always thought that the community's small size (about 3,000 people!) was key, both in how that naturally limited the possible volume of posts, and in the built-in accountability of absolutely knowing you will soon see everyone at the grocery store (there were only two; sometimes the whole town would be out of eggs; there would probably be a post about it in the listserv—possibly a baker seeking or an egg-stockpiler offering). I stayed subscribed for years after I moved away and still miss it.
Oh, and the tiny local radio station read personal messages on the air each afternoon, sent in by folks from the whole region, often for friends and family spending the summer fishing/hunting with a portable radio but no internet. Beyond amazing.
I was coming here to talk about FPF! I’m so glad we have it instead of NextDoor. Though I get annoyed sometimes that they limit you from casually cruising too many other neighborhood boards, I think that’s actually part of its success! You gotta be localized, you gotta put your name and road name with your posts. It works! (In fact, as I write this I am sitting in a u-haul waiting to pick up a piece of furniture I found on FPF)
What’s FPF? I apologize if it was defined earlier.
Front Porch Forum (I assume — from teegan’s post that Nicole is replying to) ☺️
Front Porch Forum (I assume — from teegan’s post that Nicole is replying to) ☺️
The Montana Arts Council puts out a quarterly newspaper called “State of the Arts” that I didn’t even know about until my gig as poet laureate spurred them to ask me to contribute. I love it because it’s printed on something like newsprint, which I desperately miss regular access to. It has an online version too but if you subscribe (for free) you get the physical copy.
Yes, I second Chris on this! This newsy arts paper is a treasure! I contributed a digital advice column to them what seems like a 100 years ago. I'm from MT by not there now, but I maintain and appreciate that how that subscription keeps me connected.
This supports my pet theory that data driven decision making is actually ruining everything. I loved your point about consultants would probably reach the same conclusion, but it's so hard to quantify the value of something when the cost is more in your face. Can't we do things because we like them even though they might not have a metric that supports their value?
An in person thing I discovered this year that feel so wonderfully connective:
There’s a local artist who hosts monthly “letter writing nights”. There’s a loose collection of people who go regularly, but it’s very welcoming and there’s new people there every time. People share stamps and sundries and conversation and there’s always tea and cake. It’s inspired me to write a lot more cards and letters, and I’m touched by how cherished my friends feel who receive them. I’ve also started exchanging cards with people who go to the meeting. Very dear to receive!
This is amazing! I want to do this!!
I cannot recommend it more, Zoe, yay. You just need a space with a big enough table for people to sit around and I can highly recommend bringing tea and cake. It makes it feel so much more festive and dear.
This gal (@squeezeboxpress) does it on the last Monday of the month so there’s some sort of regular rhythm which is nice. They’re really friendly and relaxed with new people which keeps it from ever feeling “clubby”.
They cross pollinate with other mail oriented groups to get the word out such as a mail/stamp art club. I hadn’t realized there was a whole ecosystem of people who gather and connect this way but it’s very dear and makes sense!
What is this magical realm you live in with an abundance of "other mail oriented groups" ?! I love this and am seriously thinking about making something like it happen. And YES re: tea and cake. I would love an excuse to make a monthly cake (and not immediately eat it all myself).
ahh, yes, could not agree about Shared monthly cake. Feels like a little hedgehog-cottage plan. I am in Oregon where there is so much sweet funky artistic tender little tendrils amidst it all the modern community challenges here too. and, i think there will be kindreds for this about anywhere based on the mail art/correspondence things I've learned about via instagram that seem to be around the world ;). For our local folks, you could take a look @pdx_correspondence_coop and @learedmond who is all @wsps_postmaster and hopefully that might start to draw you into the broader mail kindred network. Woohoo!
Thank you for the extra details!
I absolutely love this.
Oh, I want this!
Yay Cate! I’m loving thinking of this spreading like sweet seeds… I just put more details above in a reply to Zoe! 💌
The other day I spent over an hour on the phone with my best friend just going through our high school year book together. In the back the yearbook publisher had this insert that referenced current trends or newsworthy events that happened over the course of a school year. We were dying laughing over how ridiculous and sometimes dark it was.
I also like cleaning my house while talking to someone. The few times a year I call my mom to be a dutiful daughter, I call it putting on a Momcast. I let her rip and an hour later I've cleaned my whole house.
Lololol listening to my mom’s monologues on the weather and what her dogs have chewed through this week is one of my favorite podcasts
Momcast! It is absolutely the case for me too. It's been bugging me for years that she is broadcast-only on the phone. It's not a conversation! But I have to get over it. At least now I have a great word for it! And maybe a clean house!
I’ve become so bored of consuming everything digitally. Everything has the same feeling, whether it’s where to watch a movie or reading a touching personal story. I have started returning to physical books and magazines purely for the physical variety of it. I suppose my Tome is the Society of Authors’ quarterly magazine. I wouldn’t click many of the headings if I saw them online but I read it avidly to see what drama is afoot in the world of translation or how someone got burned by using a copyrighted photo in their blog about birdwatching. Why not - I scroll for entertainment and this is as good a way to pass the time as any. At least it adds texture to my consumption.
I really want my parasocial relationships to be in-person now. To that end, I got off Facebook finally, and joined a gay fiber arts guild that meets bi-weekly. Looking for a community garden to volunteer at. Plans to go see the Rollin' Homos (a queer skating group) soon + try a Capoeira class.
The specificity of "gay fiber art guild" is delightful.
and the, ahem, acronym of Fiber Art Guild is intentional. ;)
Oh Jeez, I missed it. Even better, though, even better.