Please Mr. Postman

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But not everyone has abandoned the letter. Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Dolen are co-owners of the Regional Assembly of Text, a Vancouver stationery and gift shop that boasts a monthly letter-writing club.

Spurred by a joint love of writing and, especially, receiving letters, as well as a desire to make use of their typewriters, the two have hosted the events since the shop opened in August 2005. Fedoruk reports that the evenings draw anywhere from 10 to 30 people who enjoy the novelty of the typewriters and drum up quite a racket with them.

'It's nice to feel like we are helping the letter gain some momentum again, even if it is only a few more letters written each month,' Fedoruk says. 'I don't think it will ever be what it once was--but now it has become a way to show someone you really care.'

No one to write to? No problem. Plenty of pen pal exchanges exist for people with all sorts of interests. Women for Women International, reports Lisa Rogal in Bust (April/May 2007), is now 22,000 correspondents strong. The organization facilitates correspondence between women worldwide by connecting those whose lives have been altered by war with pen pals who also provide some financial support. The women 'have been known to sleep with [the letters] under their pillows at night,' Rogal writes.

Letters evoke nostalgia, achieving treasured status long after they are received. After my grandparents died, my mother and her twin brothers found the proverbial stash of handwritten love letters--tied with a pink ribbon--while they were sifting through their parents' effects. As they sat around the dining room table, poring over pages written by my grandfather in the late 1930s, they stumbled upon a paragraph that read: 'By gosh, I think I'll have a half a stick of gum. It's pretty good--here, I'll give you the other half.' Sure enough, affixed next to it was half a stick of Beeman's Pepsin Chewing Gum--still intact in its wrapper. Try to do that in an e-mail.

Former Utne intern Elizabeth Ryan lives and writes in western Wisconsin.

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