Saviors of a Lost Art

Until now, all of my blog posts have been done with zero research, only what was already in my head. That's one of the great things about the format I chose for this publishing platform: I can think up a topic, open the laptop, and start typing. But, for this post, I elected to do a little online reading about my subject in order to get others' knowledge, thoughts, and opinions on it. Now, on with the post!

There once was a book on my shelves called The Art of Letter Writing. It's long gone because I never even cracked it open. I thought it was silly to require a structure for personal correspondence, especially the handwritten variety, since I had become too lazy even to attempt that anymore. It's been many, many years since I've handwritten a letter to someone and snail-mailed it. The only reason the topic came to mind was that I've been once again dipping into my family history.

At Thanksgiving breakfast yesterday, I lamented to my aunts, uncles, and cousins that I would be unable to write narratives of the long-gone generations because they'd left nothing behind to aid me in that endeavor. So far as I know, there are no existing journals, diaries, or letters of my ancestors, only the dry data about their births, deaths, residences, etc., that can be found in our genealogy books and online. Therefore, I told the family, I'll need to concentrate my efforts on those alive today, who can provide me with the details of their own lives as well as memories of the previous generation. I can also mine my own store of information about my relatives, to be found in my dusty old collection of letters.

Several beloved members of my family used to write me when I was much younger. My Aunt Gina frequently sent me letters filled with the events of her life as well as her thoughts and feelings. I felt very special knowing that she confided that kind of information in me. My Nana often wrote me, as well, when I was little. At her funeral, I was able to deliver a well-regarded eulogy in which I quoted from several of her letters. This material is invaluable to my historical record-keeping and my hopes for some kind of in-depth family story.

The downside of these correspondences was that I never kept up my end as I should have. I received many letters from them, but they rarely got one back. I was always so slow in the writing and I was easily distractible, becoming bored of the activity long before it was finished. I was made to feel most guilty about this today when I read a passage from Professor Thomas Hill, author of a 19th century letter-writing primer: "To neglect to answer a letter, when written to, is as uncivil as to neglect to reply when spoken to."

I came up short in maintaining more than just family communication. In fifth grade, I volunteered to become the pen pal of a boy living in Australia. I could have learned so much about his country and culture, but our few letters failed to stray beyond some of our own interests, such as his love of professional wrestling. I tired of that quickly, too.

The letters that best captured my interest were of the romantic variety. I'm an average verbal conversationalist, but I've always had a talent for written expression. So, whenever I liked a girl, be she a fifth-grade classmate or a fellow college student, I preferred to initiate communication on paper. There was an inherent danger in this method, of course, because, should my prospective female conquest not take to me, she had ready ammunition for entertaining her friends and humiliating me. My most vivid memory of this happening involved a passionate note to a girl named Mitzi, who turned me down; what followed were a yelling match on the baseball field and the teacher cutting short Mitzi's reading of my letter to the whole class.

I think that all encompasses the history of my letter writing, which, as I mentioned, ended long ago. Then, during my brief researches this morning, I came upon an article by novelist and teacher Jon McGregor, who last year tasked his students with assembling a literary journal from letters sent from all over the English-speaking world. The writers who responded to McGregor's request almost invariably included in their missives something about how letter writing was a lost art that should be preserved. "You can always tell that a cultural form is dying," remarked McGregor, "when people start making a point of celebrating it." This felt almost like a call to action for me, since I'm all about saving things from being lost to history, be they vintage words or rare comic books. The article, along with my new interest in family narratives, set me to thinking about writing real personal letters again.

"With digital communication that takes seconds (and usually less [sic] than 140 characters)," explained stationery designer Emily Holmes, "sending a handwritten note...communicates that the sender took the time to stop their busy day, put down their phone and sit down and think. To write, we have to realize how kind or generous or special someone is in our life." This seems to me like another excellent excuse to invest in some snail mail, and it needn't be restricted to correspondence with friends and family. According to Shelly Abrahamsen, a handwritten letter of concern to your senator or representative "is so much better than tweets or emails because they can see how much you care by how much time you took to express your opinion."

These are all great reasons for resurrecting a nearly lost art, but my interest in it was stoked by my desire to record family histories for posterity. As Brett and Kate McKay put it on their site The Art of Manliness, "What will we leave our grandchildren? The username and password to our email accounts?" We can do better. I can do better.

#communication #writing #genealogy