How is
letter writing
a lost art ?
(On letter writing)
Answers
Explanation:
Our first letter was from Magnus Mills. It came in a plain brown envelope, and was handwritten on a plain sheet of white A4. “Dear J,” it began. “Thanks for asking and I’m really very flattered, but I don’t think I’ll be able to supply a handwritten letter.” It went on to explain the ways his time was taken up with work or with thinking about work. It was thoughtful and well-written, and concluded with: “Therefore, I’m sorry but there’ll be no letter.” Uncertain whether the irony was deliberate (but assuming, coming from the author of the deadpan The Restraint Of Beasts, that it probably was), we went ahead and published his letter-that-wasn’t-a-letter anyway.
The starting point for the Letters Page was a simple one. I was taking up a job teaching creative writing at the University of Nottingham, and I wanted to encourage the students to think about writing in ways that didn’t involve blank sheets of paper or screens. I wanted them to think about other people’s writing before they started to think about their own, and decided that a good way of doing this would be to set up a literary journal and have the students produce it; reading the submissions, making selections, putting each issue together.
But I wanted it to be a literary journal that could find an underhand way of being literary; to take the self-consciousness out of being literary. I’ve always been interested in the kinds of writing people do when they don’t think they’re being asked To Write, and I’d been thinking about letters as a form; wondering about the differences between letters-on-paper and emails, reflecting on my own letter-writing history, noticing the democracy of correspondence as a literary practice. So the idea was born.
Tell us about the letter or conversation that changed your life
I asked people to send us letters; real letters, written by hand and sent through the post. I sat in the office with my student assistants and waited for the letters to arrive. There was something exciting about sorting through the pile, letters from Canada and the US, from Spain and Germany and France, from Donegal and Dublin and Brighton and Tring. We set to work with the letter knives and started to read. I was hoping that they would, while still being framed as letters, take the form of stories, essays, poems, memoir, criticism. What actually happened was that almost everyone wrote about the nostalgic and rare pleasure of sitting down to write a letter at all.
I grew up writing letters. They were a big part of making me the writer I am today, I think. As a child there were thank you letters, of course, ruining the long weeks after Christmases and birthdays. And postcards. Letters to the Beano, and Blue Peter, and – now tainted – letters to Jim’ll Fix It. (I wanted to drive a combine harvester, thanks for asking.)
As I grew older, I seemed to accumulate penpals the way other people collected football stickers, and by my late teens I was sending and receiving two or three letters a day. Much of what I wrote