What to say when you're writing a letter

Actually don't ask me, ask American teens Wally and Nora, direct from a kitchen table in 1950. This movie is SO BAD but actually quite helpful, with simple tips like:

* Write conversationally, as though you're talking to the person * Illustrate what you're saying with stories and anecdotes and other bits and pieces to bring the words to life * Imagine how the recipient might be reacting to your letter, how it will make them feel (* Think how you WANT them to feel, and write to create that feeling in them) * Make your letter look nice (!)

Ok let's meet Wally and Nora:

Yours sincerely, Naomi xo

ps. I first discovered this video via Post Whistle blog

Oh hello famous person, what do you think about snail-mail?

"Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone." Hedda Hopper (actor, gossip columnist)

“If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered.” Grover Cleveland (22nd & 24th President of the United States)

"I love the rebelliousness of snail mail, and I love anything that can arrive with a postage stamp. There's something about that person's breath and hands on the letter." Diane Lane (actor)

"This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door." W.H. Auden (poet)

“To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!” Susan Lendroth (children's book author)

"There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too." Tom Hodgkinson (writer, editor, socialist)

"When I was a kid, the high point of the day was to go to the mailbox and see if any mail came for me, and I'm still stuck in that mode." Jim Beaver (actor)

"I get mail; therefore I am." Scott Adams (cartoonist)

ps. Envelope pictures are of some of my latest outgoing letters. But you already knew that.

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ps. have you heard about my new letter-writing and mail-art e-course? 

Over four weeks, I will guide you through multiple methods of making beautiful mail-art and creative, handmade stationery; teach you the art of writing and storytelling; help you forge personal connections in your letters and find pen-pals if you want them; and share time-management tips so even the busiest people can enjoy sending and receiving letters. Register your place or find out more information right here. 

19 ways to make snail-mail (even more) fun

A little while ago I mentioned I was making a zine about things you can do with snail mail. Things that help you connect with other people (both strangers and friends), to play games, practice creativity, and show you care. Every page has a call-to-action, like a website you can visit or key words to Google or an address to write to.

I made 11 copies of the zine, and sent them off to some lovely blog readers. I wanted to make more, I truly did, but I don't have a double-sided printer and I just couldn't get the fronts and the backs to line up (do you know what I mean?), so I had to cut and paste all the individual pages and each zine literally took me HOURS to make.

In for a penny in for a pound, so I also hand-made some little envelope homes for the zines, out of last year's old calendar (it was SUCH a beautiful calendar - I wish I had one like it this year!). I finished the whole thing off with a wax seal, as you do.

If you'd like your own copy of this zine and can help me figure out the photocopying conundrum, let me know. Or maybe I should make it available as an e-book? What do you think? Would you like that? In the meantime, I made this little movie so you can see what's inside.

Yours truly, Naomi xo

Incoming mail - Dear Friend

“My heart was trembling as I walked into the post office, and there you were in Box 237. I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right there. Oh, my dear friend…”

Klara Novak (to Alfred Kralik), via post "The Shop Around the Corner"

Does it ever get old, that thrill of anticipation you feel when you spot something in the mailbox that looks handwritten and personal?

I received these two lovely letters and gifts in the mail last week and they made my day!

They made Scout's day, too. She loves to post my letters when I send them, and can't wait to see what people write when they reply. On this day, we picked up both letters from the Post Office on our way home and I had to promise not to open them until she woke from her nap.

Scout also likes to "read" my letters to me before I can get to them. Generally, they go something like this: "Dear Naomi, one-upon-a-time, it is a scary dinosaur to EAT YOU UP. ROAR. Now you are a cat. The end."

These real letters (from Anke in Germany and Sara just up the road) were even better. Warm, funny, friendly, offering me snippets and glimpses into their lives. As so many letters do.

This blog and my little snail-mail project have brought me so many friends, met and unmet. Thank you!

Outgoing mail art

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Hello! I'm just popping in quickly this morning because we have 10 people coming to our place for lunch today. I'm not cooking (I wish I was, because I love cooking for friends), but the house is a MESS and there is play dough in my hair and I just discovered my black pants have a hole in one knee.

Before I bundle the kids off to daycare and change my clothes and start the mammoth clean, I thought I'd share some of the mail art I've been sending all over the world. Mostly to blog readers who subscribe, but also a little sneaky letter for Pip Lincolne's "52 Hellos" project. Have you written to Pip yet? Would you like to join in?

Have a lovely weekend, dear friends!

ps. Did I tell you I'd made a gallery of all my past mail art? At least, the ones I remembered to photograph? I did, and it's here if you'd like to have a gander 

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The Most Beautiful Letter You Have Ever Written

Come join me and a host of gentle, creative, like-minded people in my five-week letter-writing and mail-art course, delivered entirely online. This course is all about creativity, personal connections, and spreading joy to others through the old-fashioned postal service. Learn more or join in here.

Thoughts about writing letters

Yesterday while I was walking home, a man came out of the post office just ahead of me and opened and started reading a letter as he walked. By the time I had caught up with him he had stopped dead in the path, oblivious to me or anyone else on the street, reading intently. I could see the letter was hand-written. As he devoured the words, a little smile played about the corners of his mouth. I walked on, smiling too.

Earlier this week I saw a segment on The Project on Channel 10. They were talking about Australia Post and the cost of sending mail. After showing the segment, Carrie Bickmore told the panel that she had recently read a letter that one of her grandmothers had written to the other, several decades ago. It was beautiful, Carrie said, and it highlighted why snail mail would still have a place in our lives today, and tomorrow. "Nobody is going to keep an email I send."

The STUNNING blue-and-gold letter in these pictures is from Maria, a truly generous and talented woman from Mexico. Maria is a writer, and a literature professor, and in her letter she told me about her cat, among other things. From her simple and heartfelt words I feel like Maria is already a kindred spirit. I can't wait to write back to her.

I posted a photograph of Maria's letter on Instagram yesterday, and a friend of mine in Sydney left a comment that her grandfather used to send them all mail-art. She's going to try and get hold of some envelopes that her mother has kept from the 70s and 80s to show me. Even 30, perhaps 40 years on, the love and care he put into decorating his letters to his children and grandchildren is still physically manifest, and able to be shared and loved with and by others.

I declare today the International Write A Letter To Someone You Love Day. Who's with me?

Happy things

This little project, a tiny zine. I’m writing a book about snail mail and, while I’m at it, I thought I’d make this as a kind of a sneak peek to help get people excited about the post and open their eyes to what’s out there for them.

The lemon tree is fruiting again. I like to run my hands along the branches when I walk past and then cup them to my nose, breathing deeply of the perfect combination of blossoms and zest. Last autumn, we were swimming in lemons. Get your orders in now, folks, if you’d like some.

Yesterday afternoon a storm rolled around and around for a couple of hours and the rain-drops were fat and full and fresh. Then the wind picked up and, finally, the seemingly-interminable heat washed away into the storm-water drains, and the world began to feel alive again.

Box 469 is smiling

The little box at PO Box 469 has been such a happy place of late, with beautiful mail and thoughtful notes arriving from all over the world. Thank you to you all, dear snail-mail friends. I am beaming.

Gorgeous mail (top to bottom) >> colourful envelope bursting with crafty ephemera from Emily (Squiggle & Swirl) // sparkling, slightly magical envelope of gifts including a crocheted snowflake from Adrienne (Misfits in Toyland) // true comfort in a pink-and-grey knitted mug warmer from Wendy (Blink Blackburn) // gorgeous card from Mr B's hometown and hollyhock seeds for my garden from Jennifer // more seeds for my garden, drawings, notes, and a letter that made me cry from Natalie and her children

The postcard that took a month to write

I am writing this post in tears. I had planned it earlier and everything was OK, but then Mr B started reading aloud to me from the little journal he had been keeping for Scout since the day she was born. Little anecdotes: everything from her birth story to her first Christmas, her cousins, her favourite toys, and her first pink and perfect sunset (last night).

Tears! Remembering those moments as he read to me was emotional overload. I kept imagining Scout reading this book for the first time when she was 12, or 16, or 21, and knowing how deeply she had been loved, from the very first moment. I said "Quick! Start writing one of these for Ralph too!" Because he will need this. I want both of my children to enter teenaged and adult life buoyed in the knowledge of their parents' forever love, with physical proof in their hands.

Which leads me to this post.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while now, but I've also been wanting to write a certain postcard, too, and I couldn't get it right in my head. I think I was giving it too much weight, putting too much pressure on myself.

You see last month I received a letter, out of the blue, from a young woman called Jessica (she has a sweet-as-pie craft blog called Jess Made This). Jessica was writing to invite me to take part in a lovely project she had launched, called Dear Holly. Essentially the concept was that you and I and just about anyone who had made it out of our teen years more-or-less intact, were invited to send a postcard sharing our words of advice or encouragement to young people all over the world.

In Jessica's words, "The idea is to cross the generational divide and provide a place online for young people to hear stories and words of encouragement and advice from those who have experienced more time on Earth than they have."

Isn't this a simple and beautiful idea? Do you want to take part? All the details for submissions are on the Dear Holly website (basically: a. send an encouraging, anonymous postcard to the address provided, and b. nope, that's all you needed to do). Their favourite submissions are shared on the website each week.

Here's what else Jess has to say, on the website:

Together we can create a living, breathing collection of real, gritty and heartfelt advice that teenagers the world over can can share, gasp at, learn from, and live by.

No longer will teens have to rely on the repetitive, commercialised advice found in any given women’s magazine or lads mag. This project aims to paint a picture of teenage life to help inspire, support and comfort those currently entering or going through it.

I’m doing this for the Holly in my life. You should do it for the Holly or Olly in yours, or the H/Olly that you once were. Join me.

So anyway, yep, I decided to answer this call, and join her. Of COURSE. But then I spent the next month wondering what was the best thing to say, in the space of a postcard, that I would have wanted said to me. And I thought it over and then I rethought it and then I guessed it and then I second guessed it and, in the end, I felt completely paralysed by the weight of what I would write.

Which was so silly of me and, ultimately, that was what I decided to write about. Because the whole dilemma felt unsettlingly familiar. Reminiscent of my teen years. Do you remember what it was like being a teenager? I remember putting on a facade of confidence and nonchalance while inside feeling completely, utterly, lost. Hopeless, useless, unworthy. Incapable, indecisive, inadequate.

So I decided to write to the teenaged me, because I imagine it's a fair bet that I wasn't alone in those feelings, and that a generation hasn't necessarily changed things all THAT much. I haven't shared the postcard here because they are supposed to be anonymous, but I don't mind you knowing the gist of what I wrote.

I told the Hollys (and Ollys) of this world that they were doing it right. Being a teen, I meant. That they weren't supposed to have it figured out yet, and that it was OK to be themselves. I also urged them to be kind to others, because confused teens are as guilty as the rest of us of sometimes overlooking the needs of others, or forgetting that each of us is fighting a battle of our own, and deserves our compassion. But most of all, with Mr B's loving words to our daughter still hot inside my heart, I told them I wished I could give them a big, motherly hug.

What advice would you give your teenaged self? Will you share it with "Holly?" All it will cost you is the price of a postage stamp, and a moment's (or a month's) thought. In case you missed the link earlier, you can find all the details about this snail-mail project here.

Dear friend, email vs snail mail (+ mail art)

Dear friend,

Why do you think we set up email and snail mail against one another, as if one was superior to the other? Electronic versus paper. Fast versus slow. Wireless versus tangible. Really they’re all just ways to communicate with one another, aren’t they? To reach out, to stay connected, to be part of… more.

I love that the movie You’ve Got Mail, a movie about falling in love - anonymously - over email was based on The Shop Around the Corner, which was a movie about falling in love - anonymously - over letters. You’ve Got Mail pays homage to The Shop Around the Corner in a hundred different ways, even in the style of writing used by two sets of pen-pals, almost 60 years apart.

But it also shows that there’s really not a lot of difference between the two forms of letter-writing, when it comes down to it. Both movies are light-hearted fun but as viewers, it’s not beyond our imaginations that two people might just fall in love with one another from their words alone, regardless of the medium through which those words are shared.

I guess that’s because humans are the ones doing the letter-writing, so the heart remains the same.

Still, I wonder.

“I would send you a bouquet of newly-sharpened pencils, if I knew your name and address,” Joe Fox wrote, via email, to his pen-pal Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail. But if their movie had been about snail-mail instead of email, well, then, he could have gone ahead and sent her those newly-sharpened pencils. And newly-sharpened pencils would be rather nice to find in your letterbox, don’t you think? (If you are pondering whether or not to send me pencils through the mail, don’t hold back.)

Did I just disprove my own point, dear friend? It’s entirely possible, but then I’m still not so sure. I guess it’s something think about. I’ll write again soon.

Hope you are well. Yours truly, Naomi xo

ps. The letters below are from another batch of mail-art I recently sent to blog readers. You can see more here.