Rachel Syme on Reviving the Lost Art of Letter Writing

In 1956, the editor William Maxwell was having some trouble with beetles in his roses. “[W]hen I come on the shreds of one that was exquisite in the morning and raddled by noon,” he wrote to one of his authors, Eudora Welty, “I have murder in my heart.”

‘Syme’s Letter Writer’ by Rachel Syme

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Is there anything quite as intimate as receiving a good letter—or reading someone else’s? And yet it’s an endangered pleasure in our era of the ephemeral phone call, the thrown-off text. New Yorker writer Rachel Syme was in the stir-crazy early months of the pandemic, scribbling notes to friends and family, when she put out an open call on social media: Was anyone interested in a pen pal? Yes, some 15,000 people. Four years later, when we speak, Syme’s ring finger is stained Lamy Turquoise, the splotch a product of one of her prized fountain pens, the Pilot Custom 823, and she has just received a package of macarons from one of her correspondents, this one in France.

“The modern world doesn’t have a lot of time for this kind of thing, so I’m doing it as a willful anachronism.”

She’s captured the joy of letter writing and receiving—and hopes to spread the gospel—in Syme’s Letter Writer (Clarkson Potter). The book, illustrated by Joana Avillez, is a tongue-in-cheek riff on Frost’s Original Letter Writer, a stringent 1867 guide to proper correspondence. Accordingly, it contains such how-tos as describing the weather with style (we may be in the season of “hibernal” and “rime,” but on the horizon: “fecund,” “petrichor,” “bloom”), the art of the postcard, and finding pen pal programs, from Last Prisoner Project to Letters Against Depression. In our increasingly online lives, amid a crisis of loneliness and polarization, sending a note is a refreshingly lo-fi act of connection. “It’s not the worst thing you can do with an extra hour,” Syme writes. “It might make someone’s week, or month, or year.”

Syme also provides ample excerpts from brilliant past letter writers (Maxwell and Welty among them) and culture hits as inspiration, including Nick Bantock’s cult classic 1991 epistolary novel, Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. For love letters, Syme recommends James Joyce’s notes to Nora Barnacle (“absolute filth,” she tells me) or those between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. There are stories of fan mail success: Prince’s adoring missives to Joni Mitchell, George Clooney’s to Paul Newman, Zora Neale Hurston’s to Langston Hughes—all of which morphed into mutual admiration.

When I raise my personal barrier to entry, “You can change your handwriting,” Syme assures me. And with a new pen in hand, after just a weekend of doodling the quick brown fox… and sending tentative missives off by mail, I see that she’s right.

Syme has an ongoing pen pal exchange service called Penpalooza, which she began in 2020, and she periodically puts out a call for sign-ups via social media. Here, she chats about favorite letter collections, fountain pen forums, and the impulse to connect offline.

Do you have a daily letter writing practice?

I try. I usually—instead of morning pages, like some people—I wake up and I’ll write a letter. I’ll wake my brain up by writing someone a letter, but usually it’s really dedicated on the weekends. So it’s maybe Sunday night, I’ll have a glass of whiskey and sit down and answer my mail. I feel like Princess Diana, like, okay, here we go.

In the book, “tending to your correspondence” is such a great line.

Tending to your correspondence. Or correspondence hour, which is what the Victorian ladies used to call it, where they set aside a time. That was back when women’s labor really involved dusting and writing letters. That was it.

Do you remember the first time that you felt very delighted by sending or receiving a letter?

It’s got to be back in middle school. I had this—she’s mentioned once in the book as kind of a disappointment, sorry if you’re out there, who was my friend from summer camp. Her name was Elizabeth, but she nicknamed herself Lissy. She was my best friend at camp and as those things go, we went to our separate places. I wanted to be pen pals and I wrote her and she, for three months, was the best pen pal ever. She made me envelopes made out of Delia’s catalogs, which I thought was the coolest possible thing. It was the ’90s. We wrote probably up through Christmas. I kept writing…. I’ve always wondered what happened to her.

I’ve always craved mail from people. I always asked friends to write me, and then if I ever went abroad somewhere, I would send postcards back. I mean, I was very much into the physical marking of something with mail.

I’ve had two pen pal bursts in my life. One was my early years in New York, when I was super lonesome here and that’s when I started writing to my college friends and doing a little bit more, like, I’m going to put thoughts in letters, thinking Oh, one day I’ll be a big writer and my letters will be important. I mean, I was 22.

That is the time for posterity.

False beliefs about everything.

After the election you put out a call for another letter exchange and got a thousand entries. Why do you think that is?

A lot of people are looking for something to break up the bummer. And I think there’s two parts of the brain. There’s the very serious one, which I’ll get to a second, which is the actual emotional undergirding of all this. And then there’s the fun one, which is a lot of people can’t believe that you can slap a stamp on something and it can go to somebody’s door. There is a certain kind of “Oh my God, I’m 16 again,” that everybody has inside them that gets activated by this. The enthusiasm that people feel is very much “Oh my God, I get to buy stationery.”

But the other thing—and I hear from a lot of people when they send me their address—they’re like, “I can’t wait to do this, I’m so excited, thank you so much for this because it’s been a long time since I connected with somebody.” There’s something about that kind of connection that a letter provides. It’s private and it’s safe and it feels like everybody is in on the joke and is signed up for the same thing. It’s a very generous space. People give of themselves generously in letters, especially to a stranger. The best letters I usually get from people are their first letter, with the exception of some that have really deepened over the years.

People sort of say, Okay, my pen pal is Meg. I don’t know who this person is. I know they live in Austin. I’m going to sit and write my life story out. There’s something really therapeutic about that. In the wake of [the election] where half the country is really happy, half the country is in utter devastation, just marking the moment feels really important. I mean, that’s kind of how the pandemic letter writing project happened. A lot of people wanted to remind themselves that it was actually happening and that it was real. A lot of people sit down and write a letter during a time of emotional turmoil. That’s when the best letters are written. It’s kind of out of the grist of how do I make sense of this? I’m living through this crazy thing.

People want to connect with other people. We’re clearly really isolated in this country. Nobody’s talking to anybody else. Everybody’s on crazy divided sides. I don’t imagine that anyone who signed up for my exchange has views that are wildly different, most people want to commiserate, but I still think a lot of people are so siloed in internet bubbles and we don’t talk to our neighbors. We don’t make new friends. Most people, I think, deep down, want to make a new friend, and they want someone they can talk to about everything that’s not in any way going to stumble into their daily life.

Valentine’s Day will be around the corner when this comes out. Are there any love letter collections that you particularly like to read?

Obviously Virginia and Vita’s are very beautiful. James Joyce’s dirty love letters are so fun. Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre. Love letters are so overexposed in certain ways. When they’re getting an entire B plot in the Sex and the City movie…

But I do think that it’s really fun to read love letters, and people forget that pretty much up until the 1920s, letters were the main way people communicated, so you’re getting the entire gamut. Love letters became an affectation, like everything else, once the telephone was invented, but you go back and you read them from the 1800s, they’re great. That’s what they had, and how else were you going to tell somebody that you love them?

Are there other letter collections that you’re reading right now that you’re feeling particularly attached to?

I finally finished Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, which is a giant tome. It’s so good. Elizabeth Bishop’s letters are great, and I always return to them. There are certain people for whom letter writing was an art if they knew that they were doing it even as they were doing it. It’s an interesting thing to read letter collections because you feel a little bit like you’re voyeuristically looking into something you’re not supposed to see. At the same time, it’s so wonderful to see what writers are like when they’re unencumbered, which is exactly what a letter is.

In terms of handwriting, every couple of years I resolve to become an elegant writer and then it doesn’t happen. Have you worked on your handwriting?

Oh, yeah. I practice my handwriting. This is going to sound psychotic, but I decided when I first started writing letters a lot that I hated how I did my S. I wanted to do a cursive S, so I forced myself to do it, change the way it was. Now I don’t even think about it. Now I have the cursive S and everything.

A lot of people worry about their handwriting and to which I say: Don’t handwrite it. I get into modes where for a few weeks I write all my letters on the computer and print them out. I’m a grandpa, and that’s fine. I did work on my handwriting, though, because I love fountain pens and I wanted to be able to use them, but I do get tired. That’s the thing that we really have lost in the modern world, is our ability to have stamina. We have texting strength. Our thumbs are amazing!

I’m using my Pilot Falcon these days. I’m obsessed with it again. I have three pens that are my prides and joy: this, my Sailor, and my Pilot Custom 823, which I regret to inform people is like $400. It’s the smoothest, greatest writer in the world. But I’ve been using this Falcon. It has a flex nib, and I’ve been feeling like a juicy write lately, as they would say in the fountain pen forums, and I hate that I said it just now.

Putting the book together must have been very, very fun.

It was super fun. I had no designs on writing a book about letter writing, but Random House wanted me to do it. I was happy to oblige, and I made it weirder than they were expecting, which is always the goal. Like, okay, well, if you’re going to let me do this, then I’m going to write some weird essays about glamour, and about Jacqueline Susann, and you can’t stop me!

The book was doing some form mirroring content. A letter can also contain whatever. It can be a vessel. It can be a Trojan horse for something.

It really means a lot to me that you didn’t think it was just pure silliness. I mean—it is pure silliness.

We can all be very serious all the time. Sometimes it’s just nice to have nice things.

They want this to be the start of an Emily Post empire, where it’s like, Syme’s Blank, and I’m like, what will be the next one?

What will it be?

I don’t know. I want to write a book about perfume. That’s my big thing. Syme’s Guide to Fragrance or something like that, but I’m looking into other things. I have a book I have to write before that, a nonfiction book for Knopf, it’s called Magpie, about the idea of the cultural figure of the magpie—of people who can’t pick one thing, basically.