Rachel Syme Teaches You How to Write a Memorable Letter
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. These little intros to our shows are almost letters, aren't they? A bit of correspondence, a promise for the future, an acknowledgement of a moment we're about to share. Well, I write to you today with some great news. We'll be joined by New Yorker writer Rachel Seim, who's going to tell us how to become letter writers.

She's got a new book out about her adventures in the postal arts, and it being Valentine's Day, perhaps she'll even help you craft a beautiful little note to a loved one. We're reading letters, we're writing letters, we're ignoring, for an hour, most other things. It's all coming up next, after this news. Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Let me tell you, this new book, Syme's Letter Writer, A Guide to Modern Correspondence by Rachel Syme, is one of the most delightful books I've come across in a long, long time.

It's an ode to relationships, our individual, induplicable selves, paper, ink, pens, intimate connection, and profligate correspondence. I could not love it more, and it even comes with a letter tucked in an envelope from Syme herself. Welcome to Forum, Rachel. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Maybe we could start with you reading a bit from that letter, which kind of sets the tone for the whole book. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

I'm going to read from the letter to the reader, which comes out of an actual envelope at the beginning of the book, which was my one dream when I set out to write this book. I said to the publisher, can it be like The Jolly Postman or Griffin and Sabine, where you get an actual openable envelope? So they made my dream come true. So I'm going to read a little bit from that letter. The rhythms of correspondence are unpredictable.

You must learn how to grow comfortable with waiting, with not having all the answers, with preserving intrigue. Over the past three years of writing thousands of letters to strangers, I've realized that what matters is the sending. Matters most is the sending. You cannot control what happens once a letter leaves your hands, and you never know what someone could be going through on the other end of your letter's journey.

But maybe your letter lands when someone is feeling terribly lonely, or when they need a sudden boost of bravery, or when they just need to be reminded of the impossible magic of the postal system. The fact that by paying less than $2, you can send a piece of paper anywhere on Earth? Preposterous.

Whenever I send something out into the void, I like to think of the infamous aphorism from the philosopher Jacques Lacan that roughly translates to, a letter always arrives at its destination. I take it to mean that if you send something out with good intentions, those intentions will be received and even boomeranged back your way. Even if a letter, even if a return letter never arrives, I hope writing letters will help you arrive somewhere new, whatever the destination may be. Ah, thanks.

Beautiful. That was Rachel Syme reading from her book, "Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence." So we communicate all the time now, you know, in the modern world. We probably communicate with too many human beings too often. But what can a letter do that other forms of communication can't? Well, I mean, a letter is self-contained, first of all.

It is something that is kind of removed from the rhythms of time pressure that pretty much every other form of communication that we have sort of puts on people. With a text message, you know, it's sitting there blinking at you from your phone, kind of demanding a response. A phone call, you either pick it up or not. A voicemail needs to be listened to. Or not. An email could be responded to at any time, but usually there's a sense of urgency to that medium.

The thing about a letter that I think is so great is that everyone at every level has something.

sets their own pace for how they want to communicate so you can take all the time you want on a letter you know nobody is waiting for a letter in the modern world that's what i tell people like this isn't you know the uh 18th century victorian era like you you needed to send a letter from the continent to ensure your mama that you had made it safely and didn't die of scurvy you

You know, we're in a time where literally if you don't get junk mail, it's a miracle when you open your mailbox. So nobody, everybody is excited to get a letter, surprised, delighted, enchanted, but nobody is waiting for it. So you have all the time you need to express yourself. Have you always been a letter writer or did you come to this medium, you know, in adulthood? Yes.

So, I mean, I've loved letter writing ever since I was a little girl from reading Victorian, like, Victoriana. Like, it will shock nobody who looks at this book to know that I was, like, very into American Girl dolls and tea parties and sort of the high femme trappings of being a little girl who loved sort of floral maximalism. Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff. Yes, and sort of pining on the moors and yearning for what you can't have even though

I was pining across the desert of New Mexico. And I loved the idea that, you know, plots from novels that turned on a letter or the idea that sort of a letter could make someone fall in love with you or change everything in your life. And then, you know, so I wrote, I liked it.

reading letters. I liked thinking about letters. I loved that book that I referenced earlier called The Jolly Postman, which was a children's book that had letters you could pull out of it. I also fell in love with a series of books that I also mentioned called Griffin and Sabine, which I write about in this book a little bit, but they're these strange, almost like Lynchian... It's not a kid's book, right? No, but I was given them as a child, which is so funny because they're decidedly for adults, but like I was saying, there's kind of these dreamscape David Lynch-tinted

imaginary correspondence between two people that communicate telepathically. And, you know, Nick Bantock, this artist who was living out in a very sort of isolated island off the coast of Washington state, made this fanciful correspondence. And so I was in love with that.

When I went to summer camp, I was the girl who would always try to convert everybody into being my pen pal after camp was over. And, like, I was way too into it. Everyone would go back to their, you know, respective... They're like, Rachel, I have a phone number. Yeah, they'd go back to their, like, respective middle schools and get embroiled in whatever local drama was happening. And I would still be, like, writing, you know, and putting envelopes together I made from an old Delia's catalog and taped together. And, you know, everything sort of fizzled out on their end. And I was the one who was, like, sending...

letters into the void always. So I was a letters enthusiast. I didn't always have people that wanted to write back to me until this project began. Yeah. We're talking with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme about how to write letters. She has a new book, Syme's Letter Writer, that's out. And she just said something which made me want to invite you all into this conversation. She said that, you know, a letter was, she was enchanted by the idea of a letter changing her life.

What's a letter you've received or written perhaps that changed your life or made you cry or that you've kept through the years for some reason? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky on Instagram or KQED Forum.

Let's talk about the little project that you got involved in during the pandemic. And I'm going to do it by way... Well, tell us what it was first. And then one of our producers actually was involved. Oh, my goodness. That's so exciting. I can't wait to hear about that. So, yeah, it didn't start as a formal project. It started, like most things, you know, sourdough starters and...

long-term crafting project started during those early days of lockdown, boredom and desire to reach out to other people. I was in my one bedroom apartment in Greenpoint. I've since moved, but I was in this very sort of, I felt very cooped and I wanted to communicate with the outside world. And I remembered I had all this great stationery lying around. I had just gotten a couple of new fountain pens and I thought, well, okay, I want to write letters. This is what I want to do with my time.

And I went on social media and I asked just very sort of blithely, would anybody like to write a letter to me back and forth? Because I had asked my friends and family if they wanted to do this. And mostly I got no takers. It was like a lot of people being like, I text you. What? So I was like, strangers, strangers are the way to do this. And sort of opened a floodgate. I got hundreds of replies.

replies pretty much right away from people who wanted to write me a letter. And I thought, I can't possibly write back to all these people. So

I have to find a way to get them writing to one another. That's whatever's going on. And you became the little switchboard exchange. Yes, I have to be at my switchboard, you know, just say, oh, hello, sir. And so I went online to try to figure out how I could start a pen pal exchange, which to me feels very like middle school. Even the word pen pal, I write about this a lot in the book where I say pen pal feels very sort of

jujune and adolescent, but I don't know of a better way to say it. Penfriend. The Victorians would say penfriend, which I like a lot, but it's sort of, it has more yearning in it. But yes, penpal is for better or worse what we have. So I looked online. Nowhere really was matching penpals to one another. There's some great sites called Postcrossing and Send a Letter and all these other sites that kind of do it. But to actually create your own new exchange, there's no way. So I finally found a site

you know, shout out to elfster.com, which is usually... Like all great literary projects, it started with elfster.com. Elfster.com, which is reserved for usually organizing office secret Santa pools. And basically, but it's an algorithm that can take a whole list of people and their addresses and match someone to someone else and someone to someone else and kind of in a round-robin way. So I sort of just put

put this out there and said, okay, if you want to write somebody, sign up for this Elfster exchange. And we had, I think, 1,000 people by the end of the first month, 5,000 in three months. And by the end of the year, when the project kind of ran its course and shut down, I had over 15,000 people writing back to each other. And here's what happened to forum producer Carolyn Smith. Yeah.

Rachel Assange matched me and my amazing, beautiful, perfect, smart, funny pen pal, Mau, in 2020 during the pandemic. She wrote about her life in London, I wrote about mine in San Francisco, but soon we came to know almost everything about each other's lives.

We saw each other through heartbreaks. We shared book recs and playlists as the world opened up. All the while, we kept strict rules. No social media exchange. No photo exchange if we were in the photos. No phone number exchange, meaning that when one of us delayed writing back, the other got anxious. All culminating in Mal visiting San Francisco in 2022. We saw each other's faces for the first time and hugged for so long and found out that we got along in person too. Rachel Syme, thank you so much for this beautiful friendship. I'm going to cry. I love it.

I love that. And you know, I'm so happy you shared that story with me. And that story I've heard

several times, which is so great that so many people have continued their relationships with this person they were matched with, have traveled countries to meet them. I have had my pen pals come for Thanksgiving. I have been writing to a woman now for five years who I've never met in person, who I would say is probably one of my closest friends. We're finally going to meet. Rebecca, I'm coming for you. But, you know, it's such a magical moment.

and sort of adventurous way to communicate with someone that used to be so commonplace and now is so not part of the standard way of going about your day that I just feel like it's just, it feels like it's removed from real life a little bit and you're in this kind of bubble with this person, which I really love. Ugh.

So, yeah, that project was called Penpalooza when it started, which was a name I came up with. After lots of thought. Yeah, in two seconds. And then it took off. And now there's still Penpalooza hashtags all the time. People share great mail art or letters they've received. And it sort of has a life of its own. We're talking with New Yorker stuff writer Rachel Syme about...

about letter writing. She's got a new book, Syme's Letter Writer. It is Valentine's Day as well. And we maybe want to give you a little help. If you want help writing a Valentine, we'll be better than Hallmark. I can guarantee that. Tell us who it's for. We'll help you compose a line or two. Perhaps

You can also give us a call, 866-733-6786, to share a memorable letter, a line maybe, from a letter that you've gotten. 866-733-6786 or forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned. Xfinity Mobile was designed to save you money. So you get high speeds for low prices. Better than getting low speeds for high prices. Jealous? Xfinity Internet customers, get a free unlimited line for a year when you buy one unlimited line. Bring on the good stuff.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the, well, maybe not, the rediscovered art of letter writing with Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writer. New book is Syme's Letter Writer, A Guide to Modern Correspondence. Absolutely delightful. Let's bring in a first caller here, Tom in Oakland. Welcome.

Hi, and thanks for taking my call. My letter story is a letter that I got from my father back in the early 70s. I am 78. I still have the letter. Wow. And in the letter, he apologizes.

for who he was to me as a father growing up. And just that he did the best he could. And what was interesting about it is that he said, I do not want you to respond to this letter. I don't want you to talk to me about this letter. I just want to apologize and hope that that's okay. And I've had that letter in my drawer. I read it every few years. I take it out. I talk about it.

I'll get back in therapy. And then I put it away and then I take it out a few years later and I read it again. It's really interesting. Wow.

Tom, that's really, really beautiful. Also, I think it kind of speaks to the power, Rachel Syme, of like a letter as a totem, as a letter as like amulet or something. Thank you so much, Tom, for sharing that story. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, I mean, I think that the letter that doesn't require response is an incredibly powerful vehicle and form of writing. And, you know, I have a chapter in the book about how to write a letter of apology. And I say you don't often need

need a response. It's really for the writer as much as it is for the reader. And it's also this way to process things on the page and give the other person time and space in which to absorb those words and live with them as Tom has in his drawer for all these years. And those words will change over time. I think one of the nice things about a letter is it is tangible, it's physical, and it's archival. So he can keep coming back to that letter and it will change meaning and

Every year, every month. And I think that's what's so interesting about it is that it's this physical thing that keeps having a life. I want to talk about love letters, but first I want to pick up Anna in Berkeley. Welcome to the forum.

Hey, Ana, are you there? Who? Oh, Ana, I'm sorry. Yes, yes, I had pen pals when I was 12 years old. I'm a baby boomer, so this was way back in 1968. And I found my pen pal. I had 20 pen pals for a while. I would get letters every single day. And my sisters were actually jealous because I would get all these letters from Canada. And I found them through the Barbie magazine because I used to subscribe. It was a magazine called Barbie magazine. I even bought the Barbie club.

And so then my friend from Mexico City, I wanted to communicate with somebody in Mexico so I could practice my Spanish skills. I'm Mexican-American, and she wanted to practice her English. And we'd write back and forth, back and forth, and she'd send me the most wonderful gifts. Like, I still have a silver medallion with very Aztec looking with an amethyst on it. I still have it from the 60s.

And then so then we met by coincidence because her family was taking a trip to El Paso, Texas. That's where I'm from. And so we invited the family over. My parents ordered Kentucky Fried Chicken that they wanted to eat with a fork and knife. And I mean, we're Mexican-American, but we would just eat like the chicken, you know, and they wanted to give them something real American. And so Dora Irma, that's her name, and I just sat there and we didn't say a word. Oh, no. Yeah.

letters to each other. And then her sister and my sister, they were chit-chatting and chit-chatting and her parents, because, I mean, my parents are Mexican, and they're talking. And we're just sitting there like nothing. And after that, we didn't write that many letters. Oh, no. Oh, womp. Sometimes it can't translate. Oh, my God. It was a wonderful experience, but it was anticlimactic, you know? Ana, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I mean...

Rachel Syme, she's living your 20th century dream right there, I have to say. That is so funny. Oh, gosh. Well, it...

It doesn't always translate off the page. Right, right, right, right. Especially with kids. I feel like there's a, there's a, yeah, your consciousness inside it, you know, 14 is a little bit different than what you can express on the outside. Oh, sure. Um, let's talk about love letters. You call them the blockbuster of the correspondence world. And you write that the love letter is our most overexposed form of correspondence and also our most emotionally illegible. What do you mean?

Well, when I say they're the blockbusters and that they're overexposed, what I mean is that, you know, if anybody has read the letter of a famous writer, usually they've read a love letter.

It's just there. People use them for quotes at weddings. People use them, you know, to on on greeting cards and to express their own feelings when they cannot. There are books of love letters. There's a plot in the first Sex and the City movie that's all about the love letters of famous men. And she has, you know, Beethoven's love letter and sort of engraved. I mean, the whole thing is just.

Kind of like we know so much about famous writers and notable people's love letters because people are always looking for a way to give voice to this emotion. Maybe the only category that someone who's thought a lot less about letters than you can name as a category of letter. But at the same time, when I say there are most emotionally illegible, I mean that love letters are...

for how public they've been and how many are published, very private. And they are about the inside of someone's relationship and somebody trying to figure out how to characterize that, how to push it forward, what they want out of it, what they've gotten out of it. And, you know, just as you can never know what's going on inside someone's marriage, I'm not sure you can understand just from reading someone's love letter what their romance was actually like.

But I do think that, you know, writing a love letter is an exercise everybody should do. I mean, it's Valentine's Day. Now is a perfect opportunity. I know that the love letters I've received have been the most meaningful to me. And you don't have to write a love letter necessarily to somebody that you're in a romantic relationship with. You can write...

I know this sounds like a cop-out when everyone's like, you could write a love letter to your friend. But it really, it has to be of a different tone than a normal letter you would write to somebody. It has to be about what this person means to you and a sort of passion, even if it's not an erotic passion, but some kind of feeling that's incredibly intense that you're trying to give words to and explain and mark for the future. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I'm just thinking about what you're saying. What's gorgeous about it is that a good love letter should be illegible, too. Like the relationship, a relationship is sort of this web of meaning between people that should have its own language, like its own nouns and little shards of memory. Yeah. And, you know, you think about how many people have that story, right, of finding their grandparents' love letters or of seeing, you know, the love letters of their

yeah, a distant relative that were sent back and forth during the war that was found in some attic. And that's how you really get to know the people. And I think that that's also really wonderful because, you know, this is where you make a kind of record for time of your relationship is in these love letters. And if you don't have them, then you're really missing out on some kind of

catalog of what you've been through. And it's, I don't think you have to go big. I'm always, when I say, when I think about love letters, I think, yes, you could write a 10 page epic ode to the person with poems and, you know, sort of waxing on forever. But it could also be as simple as a bulleted list of

of like 10 things you did together this last year that you just will never forget or 10 inside jokes or, you know, even as simple as what you want the next year to look like with the two of you. A plan, you know? I mean, you already be getting into this terrain, but one listener writes to say, I'm in college, want to write something nice for my girlfriend for Valentine's. I'm not much of a writer. What would be nice to say that isn't too boomer? Too boomer.

Okay, boomer, writing a letter. You know, I think that if you are not much of a writer, start writing.

With sensory details, which, you know, anybody can conjure. So a memory of a great meal you had together or a great trip. What did that smell like? What did that feel like? If you can just write out the memory so that they always have it, that is one thing that I think is really easy to do sort of to get you started. The other thing would just be make them laugh. Like what makes them laugh most?

now when you're not writing a letter. You know, you can bring that same sense of humor onto the page, whether it's an inside joke, whether it's like quotes from your, you know, the movie that always cracks you both up.

And then I also think that, you know, including other stuff, if you're not much of a writer, I think you can also sort of be a collector. So do you have a receipt from a dinner you had together? Do you have... I love this advice in the book. Take flat things and stick them in there. Exactly. Do you have, you know, a leaf from, you know, a walk you took? You know, do you have a...

key that you want to give. Like there's so many things you can put inside the letter that aren't words that could make it very meaningful. And, you know, when all else fails, if you don't have words of your own, you can always borrow someone else's. And there are amazing love letters you can look up anywhere. I really recommend looking up Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stalitz, for example. My advice for this college letter writer too, yeah, is I feel like sometimes if you feed a bunch of input into yourself,

So like, yeah, these beautiful letters between people. And then you sit down to write. It will kind of come out of your pen a little bit. Not that you're plagiarizing it, but just like the rhythms and the intonation. Like you almost your mind, if you put a little bit of that training data in there, it can't help but want to express that. True, true for all things, but especially for something like this, such a particular form. And I think giving someone a physical letter at all in this year, 2025, it's like that's a valentine. Yeah.

I mean, it's so sort of rare to do that, that I think whatever you write will be appreciated. I mean, one of the things that I love about letters that I found pretty much across the board is that they are just...

read so generously because of the way that they existed in culture as a kind of outside of the rhythms of daily life. So most people, whenever they get a letter, whether it's a love letter or just a random missive in the mail, I think it's just like there's something so shocking about it that it brings on so much joy. So I think the fact that you're even thinking about writing her a letter is great. And the last thing I would tell you also is that the medium is

Can be more creative, too, and that's where maybe you could put your creativity if you're not feeling like the writing. So one thing that I always recommend if you're trying to give somebody something is if you're – you can write a letter in the flap of a book that you want to give her or him. You can write a letter on a –

on the back of, you know, I don't know, anything. I think that the thing is you don't always have to just go to the store, get a card, say three things in it, and pass it along. Also, I mean, the outside of the envelope too, like with our, I feel like anyone who's ever gotten a thank you letter, the rare few out there from our kids,

Yeah. You know, like the inside is basically like scrawled like, thank you, you know, but then the outside is always like gloriously decorated, you know? Yes. So, yeah, you're kind of using what you got. There's so many ways to use your creativity. Yeah. Let's bring in Elliot in New York. Welcome, Elliot.

Thank you very much for putting me on. I think, Rachel, you might like to know that when I was a kid in school researching a school paper, I opened up a book in the library and there was one

one page inside from a letter, not the first page, not the last page. So I don't know who it was from or who it was to, but I just know what they wrote on two sides of a piece of paper there. And I think about it a lot and I thought about it just today on hold and reached a new conclusion because I always assumed that it was written

uh that the book was being read by the writer because they refer to the what they're reading which i can tell you i can tell you what it was what was it what was it today it was um a book at

a collection of writings of H.L. Mencken, who, if anyone likes letters, you know, they should go to the Strand bookstore and, you know, pick up a book. But anyway, I realized while I was on hold that there's no reason why it couldn't have been put in there by the recipient of the letter who got the letter and said, oh, I want to go check out that book. Yeah. And then they read it. Absolutely. Wow. So, and...

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, Rachel, the page includes both remarks on sensory things and a bulleted list.

And I can tell you what the list is of. And I had that when I moved from the Upper West Side to Roosevelt Island last year. And when I was unpacking that sheet,

fell out of a box and i know it's around her somewhere um i looked for it while i was on hold i couldn't find it but you can contact me if i find it you can have it wow but um yeah i could tell you what the list was what was the list tell us real quick and then we'll then we'll let you go

It was... The person was musing a person. I don't know male, female. I have no idea about the relationship, anything. But there's a lot. I mean, it's love. It's love on some level. Okay? It's a list of different ways that people communicate. And...

You know, whether smoke signal, I mean, Morse code. And at some point, this person became very enamored of making the list. And they clearly started shooting for 100. Oh, my gosh. They did hit. And you could do it. I'm sure, Rachel, if you have time. Wow. And I felt that.

what the love was, by the way, the sort of generic, is that the writer was impassioned about their own thought process. Not in an egotistical way, just in a literary way. And impassioned about relating that to whoever this recipient was, who I don't know who it was. Oh man, Elliot, thanks so much for sharing that. I mean, that is what letters are about, right? Yeah, and then

The thing about letters are they are one of the only forms of personal writing that can have these kind of adventures where they get found in the fold of a book or they move from the Upper West Side somewhere to Roosevelt Island floating around maybe somewhere in New York now. I mean, there's very few emails that you will send that will ever have like an adventure beyond your inbox. Yeah.

or fall into the wrong hands or, you know, make it into some library book in 200 years. But your letter might. Like, you don't know what's going to happen to a letter once you release it from your clutches. I mean, it can, you know, we hope it reaches its destination, but it might get clogged up somewhere in the postal service and then arrive 20 years late. You know, there's so many ways that it can play out, and you never know the outcome. And so I think every time you send a letter, it's an act of hope.

Not only that it's going to reach its intended destination, but that it might have these kind of adventures like Elliot will find it somewhere along the line and then carry it with him. I mean, that's something about writing letters. They just they tend to travel. Yeah. And, you know, it's also funny, too, because they're the form of someone kind of figuring themselves out.

via just a one-to-one communication. Like I just, I'm really struck by how different it is than the way we communicate on Instagram or on Blue Sky where we're broadcasting a particular stuff. This is like one other person is going to read this, presumably. Right. And the thing that's interesting is I always say, you know,

Letters are different than journaling or writing in your diary where, you know, unless you're a very famous writer and you think, oh, someday somebody will find this and publish it. I'm really writing for my publics here. You really are writing for yourself. And it's not the same as putting something out on Instagram where you're kind of writing for a thousand strangers. It's this incredibly unique. It's for an audience, but the audience is one person.

And so you're kind of tap dancing alone in a room with a single spotlight on you. And you know somebody is going to be watching you, maybe closer than anybody has ever watched you before. Because I will tell you that letters, especially in the modern world, are really red. People sit with them. For long times, they sit back in a chair and really absorb them. So whatever you're going to write, it's really going to land. So that seems like it's a lot of pressure. Yeah.

But there's also a lot of freedom in that because you can kind of perform and know you won't be judged because the person on the other end is going to be so generous in their reading. So it's kind of like public and private all mixed together. I love it.

And also, is there anything better than finding a scrap of someone else's material life? It's just so funny. We're talking with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme about letter writing. She has a new book, Syme's Letter Writer, A Guide to Modern Correspondence. You've got to send us some of the lines from letters that you've received. If there's just one line that's really stuck with you, email it to us, forum at kqed.org. I want those so badly. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Please read the letter I wrote

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Welcome back to Forum. We're talking with Rachel Syme about letter writing. Check out her new book, It is Delightful: Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence. We're gonna do a little lightning round of comments here, Rachel. A bunch of them are coming in and they're very cute and very meaningful.

Jesus writes in to say, I am not a hoarder, but I do have a propensity to save things that carry a memory for me. The most important letters I've saved have to be my USCIS letters confirming that I'd been accepted for a green card and for citizenship. These letters impacted my life is immense. I hope to one day show them to my daughter and my son when they are older. Chris writes, I keep cards. Recently, I came across a card my mom wrote me when my now 48-year-old son was 18 months old.

Camille writes:

Kathy writes,

Good morning and happy Valentine's Day. I've been married 43 and a half years. I love that she's still counting the half. It's been 43 years. And she's like, no, it's like when you're eight, you go eight and a half. And she's just doing it. It's 43 and a half. Anyway, I still have two letters that my big sis sent to me. One was after I got engaged where she offered approval of my fiance and gave some marriage advice. The second one is from when I was expecting my firstborn and she offered loving advice about motherhood.

Both letters were full of praise for me and how I'd be successful in these new life stages. She's four years older than me and we're still very close despite 75 miles apart. I know. These are your people, Rachel Syme. I know. I mean, I think that writing a letter to your child or to your parent is such a great experience.

practice and something that I encourage people to do once a year, you know, maybe pick a day and that's the day that you just sort of send a letter maybe off into the future. That's the other thing. I think one really great thing that you can do is write a letter with the idea that it won't be opened for a while, you know. Open this in five years, open this when you turn 18, these kinds of things, advice for the future.

You can also write yourself a letter. I actually, as a result of this book, I've become sort of, everybody tags me on letter-related things, and I found last week someone sent me, there's a cafe in London that I just so desperately want to now have a New York outpost where...

You can get a coffee or a drink, and with your order comes a note card and a fountain pen, and you write yourself a letter, and the cafe will mail it to you in one year. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. We have a great story related to this. Yeah. Amaya in Fremont. Welcome back. Hey.

Good morning. Enjoying the show a lot. I just thought of something when you guys were talking about this discussion. My daughter was born in December 2010, and I didn't know this, but my wife had written a letter as soon as we came home from the hospital for her, and she basically wrote everything that was going on at the time that my parents were over to see the newborn, my siblings were there. All the little details were in the letter, and

And then this year in December, when she turned 14, she took that letter out. And the three of us read it together. I didn't really know about it. So it was really emotional. And it was kind of shocking to see how the 14 years had gone by. But we just sat there reminiscing about everything that had happened from that time until now. Hamad, I feel like you're literally squeezing my heart right now. I know. I can feel it.

Yeah, my wife would send me emails, not quite the same as letters, that were just all the subject was always so we remember. And there'd be these beautiful little capsule memories of our kids as they were growing up. It's like one of my most treasured emails. Doesn't sound quite the same as treasured letters, but it is. It still counts. Yeah, still counts. Joe writes...

Another listener, Joe writes, "I wrote a letter that I never sent to my future daughter 30 years ago before I was even married. I kept it all these years to remind myself of the dad I promised to be. Now, whenever I'm not living up to that standard with my two kids, I swear I feel the tug of the letter and I straighten right up. I don't know if I'll ever share the letter with them, but maybe."

Wow. The telltale letter was just sort of like looming in the background. Yeah. But wow, that is amazing. I think you should share it with them ultimately. And I think that they would be proud of the dad you've become. And it's so interesting to think about, you know, what someone was thinking about you before you were even born. Yeah. I think you should share it. That's my personal. Rachel, Rachel Symes trying to stir the pot. I know. I want to start family drama. Yeah.

Let's bring in Lucinda in Sausalito. Welcome, Lucinda. Hey, good morning. I think we're going to need another hour with this conversation. There's so much to say about letter writing. I am an artist, and when I lived in the Virgin Islands, I had a note card company, and you asked about letters that you've received. So during COVID...

I received a letter in one of my note cards from one of my students. So I got to experience what it was like to receive my card. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then a good 20 years ago, a teacher reached out to me from Alabama while I was in St. Thomas, and she asked if I would be willing to

be a pen pal to one of her fourth graders. And I said, sure. So we wrote all the time. I would send her art and give her advice because she wanted to be an artist. And as I was going through some of my files, I

Last year, I found one of her letters, and I looked her up on the Internet, and I ultimately connected with her by phone, and she said how much my cards meant to her. And we have once again picked up where we left off. Wow.

So, yeah, I love sending cards. I love decorating the backs of the envelopes. I use old stamps from Europe. And, you know, depending on the occasion, I'll find a stamp that would go along with the theme of the card. So thank you so much for writing this book. We have a local bookstore, Books by the Bay. I don't know if you're interested in...

coming to our little town and talking about your book. But I know we would pack the house. Well, I would love to come to Sausalito. Thank you, Lucinda. Yeah, thank you so much. That's a lovely story. Of course, being a writer also, my mind always goes to sort of the content of the letter. But one of the things that's great about your book is like you get into so many different

different ways of kind of, I don't want to just say decorating, but adding meaning to these correspondences by, you know, yeah, the decorations, the things you slip into them. Tell us a few more of those for people. Sure. So, yeah, my book, just for people who may be interested in checking it out, it's modeled after a guide from the 19th century called Frost's Letter,

Frost's original letter writer, which was written by this woman, Sarah Annie Frost, who was sort of a proto-Emily Post. And she had all these rules for letter writing, like how to write a letter to a governess and how to write a letter requesting a horse that don't really apply in the modern world, but I tried to find things that could apply. And I also wanted it to be, like you're saying, Alex, is kind of a visual feast and a something where you pick it up and you'd want to do things and go out and get things and collect things right away. So I have all of these...

Sections on things you can mail and slip into your letter and how to embellish your letter. There's an entire section on hot glue guns, laminating machines, sticker subscriptions, things you can put inside e-books.

like tea bags, paper incense, washi tape samples, iron-on patches, pressed leaves, Polaroids, clippings from publications, you know, things you cannot absolutely mail. Like, you're not allowed to mail coins. That's illegal, and so is mailing glitter these days. That's a crime. Yeah.

But there are so many things that you can do to embellish. I mean, there's a great... I consulted with my favorite pressed flower artist in Brooklyn, Lacey Porta, who has a section that she helped...

I interviewed her about how to press a flower, and there's also another section on how to get involved with wax seals from a great wax seal maker called Catherine Hastings. And calligraphy. I mean, there's a lot of little crafty, fun things you can do in this book that aren't just the writing, but it's also...

Sort of like a hybrid, like writing prompts, writing guide, sort of musings about writing and what its purpose is in the modern world. And then just things you can do and buy and get really into, like how to take an old matchbook and make it into a bookmark you can mail. There's a variety of ways people can use this book. There's so much fun stuff in this. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, the comments that are coming in, Rachel, are just so amazing. Yes, I want to hear more. Bob writes, when my wife was 11 years old in the mid-1960s, she saw a display for Spanish soap that included a doll.

She wrote to the soap factory in Barcelona asking if she could get such a doll, which they sent and we still have on display. She wrote a thank you letter, and in it she asked if anyone at the factory would want to be her pen pal and help her practice Spanish. The daughter of one of the factory workers, Angelina or Angelina, responded, and they exchanged letters for many years. In 1981, Angelina, so this is already like 17 years after Angelina.

Angelina happened to be in San Francisco on vacation and met my wife at our wedding reception at the Presidio. The correspondence with Angelina also helped my wife to become a Spanish teacher at several Bay Area colleges.

That's incredible. My goodness. What a story. I mean, what I take away from that is that writing letters can bind two people in a way that I actually have a hard time imagining what else could do that from afar, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And that it's from afar. I mean, that's what's amazing. It's like so many of the people that

I ended up writing to as a result of this project are people I would have never encountered in my wanderings across this earth, but have become so dear to me and so close to me. And it's only through this medium of letters and

I just feel like we're all... I mean, the main feeling I get from a lot of people is that we feel really disconnected, even though technically we're more connected than ever. I mean, that's just the refrain of living in the modern world. And my rejoinder to that has always just been, well, write a letter, because I just feel so connected to these people. And it's not kind of like a...

woo-woo hallmark kind of connected, like, oh, I see you, you see me, we're one. It's like, I know them. I know their hopes. I know their fears, their anxieties, what they're going through, tragedies that have happened in their life. They know the same thing for me. It's this kind of like cone of both like secrets and

sort of joys and confessions and excitement. Shared intimacy. It's so intimate. And I think that there is such a sort of unwritten, unspoken rule around letters that sort of what happens in the letter stays in the letter. I mean, it would be...

the height of gauche to take a picture of somebody's letter and put it on social media without their permission, right? Like what you write in the letter is sort of sacred for the two people that are involved. And I don't know many media that are like that anymore where you feel like you can just be totally free. Yeah. And no one's like selling you car insurance off the back of it. Exactly. There's really no agenda other than to keep going. Wow. Let's bring in Jane in Sunnyvale. Welcome, Jane.

Hi. Hi. I'm finding this very intriguing. I have a pen pal of 50 years. We exchanged each other's names in seventh grade. We've continued

back and forth. We're very different. We've met a couple of times. I can relate to the gal from Texas that we really didn't click when we met. We were better on the page. Yeah. But we soldiered on and now we exchange at Christmas time. But now

Now I'm in my 60s, I'm cleaning the house out, and I found a lot of the original letters. I have, you know, a box of them. What do you think about packaging them up and sending them back to the person? Is that rude? Is it a kind thing to do? Do you want them out of your house for cleaning reasons or just because you're sort of, you don't feel sentimental about them anymore or you think she would want them?

I think she would be intrigued. She's a licensed psychologist. I think it might be interesting for her to read through them. I would read through them first, but I know when I pass, nobody else is going to be that intrigued by these things. She would be the only one who would find value. But when other people have sent me, like back to picture, I've sent them, I'm like, oh, well, that's...

They didn't want that anymore. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would accompany, first of all, I would take pictures on your phone of, thank you, Jane, of your side of the letters just so you always have them just in case you regret sending them off. But I would also maybe send them, if you really feel like she would get a lot out of them, send them with a letter. Send them with a cover letter.

And also now you've got cover. Rachel Syme said you could do it. I said you can do it. I mean, I don't really know the etiquette of sending back someone's original letter to them. A lot of people take pictures of their letters before they send them because they want their copy of. I do that too sometimes, both because I want to know what I wrote in my last letter and also if it should get lost in the mail. Sometimes I'll be able to just send somebody a

picture of what I had written. But I think in this case, if you really think she would get more out of this archive than you currently are, I mean, letters are meant to be enjoyed. So I think you're totally free to send them back. Just send a nice letter saying, I thought you would want these and this is why. And, you know, I think she'll receive them with the best intentions. Yeah.

I'm going to give you a few more of the comments that you brought up. I feel like every show is a little bit of a probe of the sort of audience's collective consciousness, and this is like one of the best probes we've ever found. Here we go. This is Cami writing in to say, a few years ago, one of my best friends from college was dying from cancer.

I wrote him a letter about the top 10 reasons I loved him. I cried throughout writing it as 40 years of memories flooded back. He responded, which was beautiful, but even more touching was when one of his daughters shared with me that he folded the letter and put it in his pocket and carried it around the last few weeks of his life.

and would occasionally open it and read it. - Oh, my heart. - I know. Shelly writes, "In grad school, a teacher assigned us to write a letter of consequence. I chose to write a letter from my mom, who passed when I was young, to myself.

That prompt changed the course of all the art I've made since. Walter writes, Wow.

Laura writes, I have a long box of my parents' love letters during World War II. They are all numbered, a lot of them written before they were married. I read a couple and I was so touched. My mom was a 23-year-old engaged woman going to take the train from Los Angeles to San Francisco to spend a long weekend with my dad, again, pre-marriage. To get a glimpse of my mother as a young woman during an amazing time did astound me. And here's your last one.

Mike writes in to say, My brother was killed in Iraq on March 14, 2007. In the days following, his letters began arriving one by one over several weeks. A poetic message with a pressed flower for my nine-year-old stepson, a stream of sincere gratitude for our mother. They added up to about a dozen. Then when we thought the magic had ended, my sister who lived in remote Bethel, Alaska, received a package.

In it was a note referencing a heart-shaped rock my brother found while on patrol. He noted that when he showed it to his interpreter, he implored him to put it under his pillow and pay attention to his dreams. He then wrote, So I put it under my pillow and had a dream about a fortunate meeting with my dad. That's the short story. What these letters did was transform our grief.

For me, hopelessness shifted and a kind of meaningful mystery landed in my body. Today would be my brother's 50th birthday. I think about him every day, a kind and generous soul who shared his love and courage to the end. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Rachel Seim, for just bringing this community out all together. Thank you, Alexis.

I hope people write more letters. Yes. Her new book is Syme's Letter Writer, A Guide to Modern Correspondence. Thank you so much again. The 9 o'clock Hour Forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, and Dan Zoll. Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher. Jennifer Eng is our engagement producer. Francesca Fenzi.

who's our digital community producer. Judy Campbell is the lead producer. Danny Bringer is our engineer. Katie Sprenger is operations manager of KQED Podcast. And you know who really makes the show? You all out there. Thank you so much. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum with me and Kim right after the break. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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