I found #lettermo on a tweet from Joe Hill, son of Stephen King and glorious writer in his own right. I googled it and thought it was a great idea.
I write occasional letters and send cards in mailing boxes with birthday presents, but a letter a day for a month sounded more significant. As much as I’d like to send personal letters to my peeps, though, they know I’m busy and I’m not as busy as they are actually, so I’m not writing to them.
I wanted to send a letter to some of my school teachers, not high school teachers because I think teenagers kind of suck a bit, so they probably wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway, but I thought the primary school teachers might. But I couldn’t find them on facebook or the school websites or anything; there wasn’t even a list of current staff members. Sheesh! So I looked up various spellings of my own name in the white pages, and voila! There were a bunch of people with my name in variable spellings, and, there were plenty of people with my parents’ names as well. So those random, potential identity thieves or crotchety old folk will be the recipients of my daily mail. Hopefully they will be pleased to find some sincerity in their mail box alongside the usual bills and catalogued rubbish. Or not. Perhaps they will be mightily offended to find more unsolicited nonsense, in which case, screw them.
I have enjoyed writing the letters so far, though they are not so much interesting literary masterpieces as much as they are the musings of a tired woman who may or may not have battled with the kids at bedtime, and who is probably counting the calories to see if she will take a glass of wine to the couch. Perhaps those crotchedy bastards will wonder why I bothered to send them such simple nothings, or maybe the poetic counterparts will appreciate a small look into someone’s life, and send me a small look into theirs.
This whole idea has spawned some cool ideas of what to send to whom, but they come to me in the mornings, and I do the writing in the evening when I’m preoccupied and tired, so maybe next time.
I thoroughly recommend A Month of Letters.