Speeding Away…
The post has been sneaky. On Thursday I opened my letterbox to find one of my letters to Karen returned by Monsieur La Poste – the address label must have peeled off in the cold interior of the postbox. On the same day, my forward-mail from London arrived, including a card sent by Karen on 17th December… part of our correspondence making a late entrance. In some ways this is apt. Because it takes a while for our letters to travel from Geneva to London and back, they often overlap – I’m not always sure which letter Karen is responding to, but I like the guessing, the calculating, the chance arrivals…
Here is a post-van I caught speeding away in the Old Town:
I don’t think letter writing is dying, but escaping, changing into something else, speeding down the road in a yellow van. I wrote a lot of letters this week, including one to my Godmother, who I had lost contact with for about seven years, and who found me again through my blog. We used to keep a ‘letter book’ – a small book we sent between the UK and the US, writing new entries to each other over time. It was a bit like a secret blog between two people, or a shared notebook.
My 'letter-workshop' from my week of letters
Before I read Karen’s ‘Wing’ on the blog, I received it on the back on a yellow bird. I do think sending a poem in a letter can give it the secrecy to breathe and come alive as Karen quotes below. Secrecy brings excitement, an impulse to continue or take the poem elsewhere. It makes it more like a curious object, that can be looked at from several angles and appear different. It moves it outside of the person who wrote it.
The 'Wing' I received
The yellow messenger
Is Karen is one step ahead of this blog post? Has she received my latest letter? Partners in crime La Poste and Royal Mail keep this a secret…
Tags: Karen and Miriam correspond, Karen McCarthy Woolf, La Poste, letter writing, Miriam Nash, Royal Mail, secret, yellow messenger