First Letter
Today I received my first letter from Karen. Since our meeting on Monday I’ve had a strange expecting-post feeling – an excitement. The feeling comes in the morning, but of course the post doesn’t. But when I got home at 11pm, there it was. Karen sent her letter in a beautiful card with a picture of a bird – a symbol for our new correspondance. Here’s a half-light photo:
Inside was a pressed flower: white, with yellow stamens poking out, surrounded by grass-like shoots – like the veins of a leaf without the structure. I’ll have to ask Karen what kind it is. Opening the envelope was pure delight. A letter holds so many possibilities, so simply.
I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about letters this year. I sent and received hundreds of letters as a teenager, partly because I moved from the Scottish Highlands to Devon, leaving my best friends behind. In April this year, as part of the Slow Down London festival, I ran my first Creative Letter Writing Workshop at Foyles bookshop. The idea was to ask ‘What do letters mean now that they’re no longer an essential means of communication?’. For me, the answer to this is exciting, because I don’t know – they can become whatever we want – fragile documents found only in archives and museums, or a living form of writing that opens doors to the unexpected…
This Autumn I ran a series of ‘Snail Mail’ workshops, and received an amazing and certainly unexpected response. All sorts of people have shared stories – memories of opening letters, letter-inheritances from loved ones, the need to receive something physical in times of grief. One participant wrote a letter to her pair of walking boots, another to the science cabinet at his primary school, another to ‘flirtatiousness’. Some of these letters can be seen on my website.
As well as the workshops, I’m keen to explore letters and letter writing in my poetry. So I couldn’t have been happier when Karen invited me to start a creative correspondance. We haven’t imposed any criteria on ourselves – it will be organic and neither of us knows what will happen. I already feel inspired – receiving a carefully pressed flower, smelling faintly of the book it once lived in, has to be the start of something beautiful…
This is where I stop typing, and pick up my pen…
Tags: bird, Karen McCarthy Woolf, letter writing, Miriam Nash, poet, pressed flower, Slow Down London