A Letter on Letters
Go Ahead and Laugh: Writing Letters Was Actually Pretty Radical
I miss writing letters.
More truthfully, I don’t miss the cramp in my right hand. I don’t miss running out of space and having to jam run-on thoughts up the margins of the paper. I don’t miss how long it took to get a response to nagging questions, such as “Are you still my girlfriend? I had to ask, since you referred to me as ‘Richard’ in your most recent salutation…” What I do regret, is the loss of the intimacy.
In my writing studio, I have a cardboard shoe-box in which I keep all the letters I received between 1983 and that lonely moment in around 1999 when I finally realized why no one was responding to my letters anymore (hello, email!). Every one of those notes was painstakingly scribbled out by someone — a friend, a family member, a girlfriend — who trusted me enough to confide in me and knew I would respond in kind. Reading those letters now makes me feel the mindless rush of time. We were so unbelievably earnest then, so devoid of the snarky, ironic detachment that is the default tone these days. And how did we ever have the time?
I have one letter, written in 1986, that is 61 pages long and includes rudimentary illustrations, improvised haikus and intricate drawings on the envelope. The sender, my old friend John Wall, is now a seasoned architect in Vancouver, B.C. But that summer, was just like the rest of us: curious, confused, rudderless. He also had straw-coloured hair that shot out of his scalp into undisciplined ringlets that defied order. In this legendary letter, he has drawn a vector to represent how it feels to be 19, renting a room above an Ethiopian restaurant in London, England, while pulling in minimum wages at a fish n’ chips restaurant:
John’s letters had a three-ring circus approach to content that made them a lot of fun to read. He’d be telling a story and then, right in the middle of a sentence, he’d be reminded of a Talking Heads song, and would proceed to fill the rest of the page with the applicable lyrics. Which was exactly what he’d be doing if you were having a conversation with him. I always cherished John Wall’s letters because they weren’t just from him, they were him.
***
After graduation, most of my friends blew away from White Rock, British Columbia like dandelion seeds in the wind, drifting to far-flung locations like Kauai, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, New York and London, England. My first actual job, as a cub reporter on my grandfather’s Northern Sentinel newspaper, took me to the the isolated coastal community of Kitimat, at the end of a long fjord in Northwest British Columbia. At nineteen-years-old, my first time ever away from home, I was living an austere existence in a rented basement apartment with my guitar, an old bike and a stiff, ancient Underwood typewriter. When letters arrived, I’d brew up some tea, lay back on a floral couch, and absorb every single word. Then I would read them again, poring over the words for subliminal content. I was that kind of lonely.
One of those letters came from fellow U2 fanatic and confidante, my friend Leanne. Her family, German Mennonites, were so deeply religious you could see the guiding hand of God even in their choice of household kick-knacks. By age 14, Leanne had realized there was no room for the Holy Trinity in her evolving skepticism. Mennonite families are typically very close-knit; all of our high school friend group was aware that Leanne’s proclamations of agnosticism had led to dinner table clashes with her resolutely devout sisters and parents. It was quietly understood that we — her godless school friends — were not popular in the Isaak household.
By the summer of 1986, Bean (her nickname perfectly captured her lithe, tomboyish figure) had gotten a restaurant job and moved out of her childhood home into an apartment with a roommate. That summer, she penned me a series of bleak, cynical letters in handwriting that seemed to be in a hurry to fly off the page. Facing down adult life for the first time, she’d started to notice how people really behaved, left to their own devices. She came to the conclusion that most of us were play-acting our way through life. “The only thing people get better at as they get older,” she writes, “is hiding their pain.”
Bean’s letter caught me in the suspended state of bewilderment that hung off me like a fog in those months of my teenage years. Nothing made sense and nothing really mattered. Anything I inspected — a potential career, a political stance, the existence of God, the future of humankind — simply crumbled like ashen paper under my scrutiny. My default mood seemed to fall somewhere in between absolute hopelessness and a pure exhilaration at being alive. I’ll bet I wasn’t all that much fun to be around, but there I was.
Meanwhile, another dear friend, Jackie Janzen — now a private school teacher and counselor in Surrey, B.C. — composed bi-monthly epistles that seemed to find me exactly when I needed them most, wherever I was in my travels. Jackie and I had a lot of history, even then: we’d stood up for each other in the cliquey hallways of our high school in White Rock, toured British Columbia as an acoustic country duo, read each other’s short stories and poetry, and formed a bond that lasts to this day. She and I had an unbreakable platonic bond, and I am a better man for all she taught me about womanhood.
Jackie’s letters were emotional tours de force. All she had to do was watch the sun dip below the horizon on Vancouver’s Spanish Banks, and she’d easily come up with two pages of prose to describe the event. Despite not being what anyone would call a methodical or organized person, Jackie had (and still has) infinite patience for matters of the heart. Her mixtapes weren’t just collections of songs, they were archives of private jokes, shared memories, and philosophical advice. She spent weeks crafting these musical anthologies of our friendship. I still treasure them.
I was at York University in Toronto when a six-page letter in crisp cursive arrived from my friend Kelly, who had just been hired by a rare rocks and gems shop up in the Rockies at Banff, Alberta. Kelly’s letters were always smart and funny, and I had a little crush on her, so I impulsively ripped into the envelope while walking across an expanse of grass leading to my residence. A four-leaf clover blew out and I had to chase it for ten feet so I wouldn’t lose it forever. Recently, I found that letter again and read it for the first time in 33 years and was delighted to discover that the clover was still perfectly intact.
Can’t pull that off with a text.
I only have one friend left who still writes letters. His name is Stevo, and he’s a musician/teacher living out on what British Columbians call the Sunshine Coast. Some people are into slow food; Stevo is an advocate for what you might call slow correspondence. He makes his own psychedelic postcards, recycles old maps and concert posters into letter paper, and stubbornly hangs onto the art of letter-writing like a hiker washed into a swollen creek hangs onto an overhanging branch. In a West Coast community where being an oddball is mainstream, Stevo is unique in his dogged pursuit of self-expression. On any given afternoon, he can be found playing a theremin in the woods, recording the sound of a creek or studying the comparative percussive qualities of a cedar and a fir tree.
***
In the mid-1980s, theoretical physicist Michael Goldhaber started to sense that something was happening to human attention spans. The sheer amount of information, Goldhaber concluded, was starting to rewire our brains. Casting around for a name for this phenomenon, Goldhaber landed on a succinct term coined much earlier, by Wisconsin psychologist Herbert A. Simon: The attention economy. The crux of Goldhaber’s message was that there was only so much attention we can give to competing blips of information before we shut down and stop absorbing anything.
I know what that feels like, and so do you. Before bed, I scroll through Facebook and Instagram, get drawn to one or two specific titillating or shocking images, then catch myself. My wife, reading next to me in bed, wonders aloud what I’m engaged in. Nothing, I say. A minute later, my response proves truer than I wish it to be, when I realize that all I can recall from the past ten minutes of scrolling is a topless woman, looking back over her shoulder at the camera with wild brown eyes and a practiced pout. I use social media all the time, mostly just as a viewer, but I have been know to post on occasion. I still don’t know what I think about it, in the big picture. We stage moments of our life like advertisements for a tourist destination, and then watch as the comments pile up like photogenic autumn leaves under the posting: “Looking good man, haven’t aged a day…” Even the comments are mostly just a kind of self-branding, too. We have internet personas, and they are usually much cooler than we actually are. We are all masters of soundbites, of cool quips that reveal about as much about us as does the average job resume.
I write because writing helps me understand what I’m doing here, on this planet.
Word choice, tone, line length, italicization, quotation, hyphenation: those are all the tools I need to say what I am trying to say. I don’t have much patience with the word-spill that characterizes Instagram. Somewhere along the line, some key Millennial influencer decided that punctuation and capitalization — hell, any kind of sentence structure — was for old-timers and academics. I get it; exclamation marks can be overused and quotation marks are tiresome, but not using any punctuation is like trying to express empathy or joy with a faceful of Botox. I’ve heard the arguments for brevity and economy (who has time for commas and semi-colons?!) but I don’t buy it. After all, if you can spare 20 minutes crafting a bitchy 30-character rant on Instagram, I think you have the time to compose a text that actually says more than “yup” when I ask if you have any time for a Zoom meeting next week.
And what about the platform we once called electronic mail? A college friend of mine recently mocked me for using email to reach out to him during the pandemic. “What’s wrong with email?” I responded, genuinely confused. “Man,” he wrote back, “Because it’s, like, email.” By that, I was meant to understand that email is archaic.
After that, I faithfully responded to his almost daily Facebook posts when I felt like he was calling for a response, and just liked the rest. But a strange thing happened on the way to keeping the friendship alive. My university friend didn’t want emails…but he’d ghost any of my attempts to communicate via a Facebook private message. He wanted us to be public or nothing.
This college friend has not come to his conclusion alone. I have at least five or six long-time comrades who seem to have decided that private messaging is a waste of time. Some of these people are the same cultural critics who I recall being contemptuous of Madonna’s devotion to publicity in her 1993 movie Truth of Dare: “She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk,” observed her then-boyfriend, actor Warren Beatty. “There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?”
I would argue that Madonna’s instinct for living a more or less public life is now as mainstream as it was then sensational. Most of us have drunk the Kool-Aid and don’t mind how it tastes, either.
So, all the evidence suggests a hyper-speed future in which every truly conscious moment of our lives is wasted as we flip mindlessly from one distraction to another. But, somehow, (in the words of Alexander Pope, one of the early eighteenth century’s finest pop culture bloggers) hope springs eternal. We have been warned that the internet has stripped us of our ability to concentrate on anything for any significant length of time. But then, consider the popularity of the podcast. Look what www.podcastinsights.com says about the medium:
* 16 million Americans describe themselves as “avid podcast fans.”
* There are over 1,750,000 podcasts, with 43 million episodes.
* 48% of the above avid podcast fans are between 12 and 34 years old.
And what, really, is podcasting if it isn’t focused attention on one subject? In fairness, the average podcast lasts for 38 minutes and 42 seconds. But Joe Rogan’s conversation episode #1530, with comedian/actor/writer Duncan Trussell, clocks in at five hours and 19 minutes long. “What a trip,” reads one of the show’s YouTube comments, but as I write this 5,541,333 viewers have joined Joe and Duncan on it.
I think I have an idea why the podcast medium works so well: The delivery is conversational. You can almost leap into any episode, anywhere, and feel like you belong there. Often, more than one person is weighing in on the subject at hand: you’re a fly on the wall in the vicinity of a conversation rich with content, relevance and quotability. You’re given access into the private lives of the pod-casters: their favourite coffee roast, how the pandemic is going, who’s in love, who’s pregnant. But the secret weapon of a great podcast is its ability to communicate complex ideas in a relatable way. As a father, I am humbled by the medium’s power to influence: my deeply private and cerebral 17-year-old daughter has learned more from the podcast My Favorite Murder in the last few years than she has from me.
She’s my only child, the only chance I have as a father to reach across a generation and leave a meaningful, lasting imprint. Hopefully, one that will outlive me. Sometimes, especially when we haven’t been getting along, my instincts tell me to sit her down and level with her, frankly. But, just like her mother, she is not comfortable talking about how she feels in the heat of the conflict. Her modus operandi swims upstream from everything I have been taught about women. I still haven’t found the ideal way to talk seriously with my daughter about weighty subjects. Initially, I reasoned that, perhaps, email might allow her and me to thoughtfully itemize our grievances and expectations in our own time. But she only uses email to keep in touch with her grandmother and almost never checks her inbox. She hates it when my texts are longer than six words. She’s not on Facebook and only uses Instagram to post pictures of our dog and chickens.
Maybe this is a cue. What if the solution to my problem is as simple as sitting down and writing an actual letter to my daughter? What happens, neurologically, when we scribble out our thoughts, by hand? Is it different from what happens in our brains when we compose an email or text? Usually, if I am angry or upset, I furiously scratch out the essence of what I need to say in a notebook with pen and paper. Then I walk away, get a glass of water, take a breath of fresh air, go for a hike in the mountains. Then I return to the journal, re-read what I have written. What follows is a moment of clarity in which I can distinguish between what is irrational and what is the unvarnished truth. This very moment of clarity is the thing that is missing when I fire off a text to someone who is irritating me.
American novelist Truman Capote has said that good writing, “provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.” This further understanding used to be accomplished by sitting down, cracking a wide ruled 8x10 ½ notebook, finding a still place in the mind, and writing until we knew how to solve the problem.
Maybe someday — when we realize that quiet places of the mind are at a premium — we’re going to want to revisit, some way or another, the solitude of pen and paper.
