Book Review: Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence
Set Your Mailbox to Overflowing with Your Typewriter, Fountain Pen or Pencil.
Don’t let the quaint title, a riff on the cute but very dated “Frost’s Original Letter-Writer: A Complete Collection of Original Letters and Notes,” published in 1867. That book, set on letterpress printing presses, was all about templates for ‘declining to recommend a cook,” “advising a young man to study a profession” and “Note to Accompany Flowers to a Young Lady.”
Syme is author Rachel Syme, founder of penpalooza, a website founded during the plandemic in 2020 to meet the needs of people starved for connection. Syme suddenly founded herself overseeing a glitchy website for 15,000 correspondents starving for something, anything in their mailbox besides bills and advertisements.
Within days, weeks, her own mailbox became stuffed with letters and postcards around the world. Even today, five years after the plandemic, she receives 3-4 personal letters a day in her mailbox. She has something to look forward to the moment she walks in the vestibule, battered by life. She has something to do besides waiting for a text message or doom scroll on her phone. She has a reason to live: answer letters around the world. Syme has pen pals and so can you!
Syme is not shy about how she became ‘so popular,’ to use the trite phrase. In “How to be a pen pal,” she talks about one pen pal in particular, Amy, that she met online (nearly all pen pals these days start with some kind of online connection), and segues right into how to write your first letter. You could launch yourself into snail mail with a postcard or a short letter introducing yourself and why you want to more letters. Send out the kind of letter you might like to receive, she says.
Or you could eschew penpalooza, post-crossing.com or Typepals.com (which is how I started my letter-writing career) and write a fan letter. Everybody writes Tom Hanks, and you can too, but how about someone else famous? George Clooney apparently writes letter everyday, which is how he ended up becoming friends with Paul Newman and Walter Cronkite. What if you wrote letters to the famed in your line of work? Are you an aspiring chef? Write to those you see in cooking shows, in care of their production companies. Aspiring memoirist? Seek out their agents and publishers, slip in a c/o (in care of) on the second line of intended’s address. I just sent out a typed fan letter to Rick Steves, and I fully a personal response in my mailbox.
Don’t feel like your letter has to be perfect, every sentence complete. “I love it when a letter includes a big swing, a 1/2 developed idea,” Symes said. That’s opportunity for your addressee to respond with “What do you mean by….?,” “I know how you feel…” or even “I couldn’t decipher….did you mean?”
You could always send a recipe. The best are hand-written or typed ones. For years, I would type out "a recipe for birthday cake,” using all the fraction keys on my typewriter keyboard. 1/2 cup of happiness, 1/3 Tablespoon of clouds, 1/4 teaspoon of Himalayan sea salt with whimsical mixing and baking instructions. “Serves many with few leftovers.”
Syme writes about pressing flowers (too much time), laminators (too much more time) and even how to make a book mark out of an old matchbook (I have to find a matchbook? where?) While I’m intrigued by the idea of spritzing a letter with some kind of scent, I’m not about to spritz my missive with lilac-scented Mrs. Meyers bathroom spray. Writing about your dreams? An idea now that I own a pen that lights up the moment you press the nib to paper (courtesy of a school principal/customer).
Syme’s book of famed and not so famous pen pals is reason alone to plunge into her book somewhere around page 72, when she writes about the mysterious, “Griffin and Sabine.” I like the idea of a writing ritual (mine’s lug Selectric onto desk, don’t knock over hot coffee, pull out box of Southworth paper, turn on typewriter, slip in paper, day dream out window). Letters from abroad? I”m doing that next time I use my passport. “Gone are the days of pacing nervously for weeks to see if someone is still alive after an epic journey (and that’s a good thing, blood pressure wise) but I like to think of writing letters from wherever you are in the world as a no less insistent activity than it once was. You don’t need to report that you didn’t die along the way, but letter-writing does reaffirm the fact that you are aware and attuned to the world as you are moving through it. I like to choose who I’m going to write to before I take a trip— I recommend asking a few friends if you can have their addresses before you go and write them down in a notebook that you keep in carry-on. It helps to know you are going to put your day into a letter, because it gets you in the habit of noticing details, the crackle of a baguette, the sound of a brass band on the street, the smell of briny fish, the oily surface of an ancient canal, the vivi colors of a fruit stand.”
And Syme says: “Postcards are great for tiptoeing back in touch with someone you have corresponded with in a while (I always like to send a short postcard to restart a mail volley with someone I have lost touch with, as a long letter can feel intimidating) but they are also an excellent in between letters placeholder to someone you already write to frequently. I am fast and loose with postcards when it comes to people I tend to write long letters to. I particularly like to to send them to promise that a letter is coming soon. Be free with your postcards. Send them to everyone!”
It’s only inevitable that Syme talks about glamour since she’s writing about writing letters now that’s it’s antiquated, old-fashioned and slow. Old letters have appeal because of the paper that they were written on, the fountain ink that was used, the stamps that were licked onto and adhered to the upper right corner of the envelope, which might have read ‘air mail’ prior to 2006. She tells the story of Irish writer Maeve Brennan, most known for her New Yorker column, who ended up later in a flophouse and died in nursing home at 76 years old. Brennan lived in hotels, drank cocktails with her editors and sat in bars and restaurants recording impressions in a notebook. “Glamour is what happens encounters dip into enchantments, when the mind starts to overflow its rim with both confusion and desire,” Syme says. “…Glamour, like the grammatical it derives from, invites you to read. The few letters we have by Maeve Brennan currently sit in a library in Atlanta in a locked archive. She remains elusive, even now. But I encourage you to channel her in your letter-writing— remain breathlessly curious about others, but also leave room in your letters for a bit of mystery and intrigue.” In other words, don’t divulge everything.
“Maybe we are entranced by vintage love letters because they feel like a relic of something we have lost”. — Rachel Syme
Syme goes on to share how to write a bitchy letters (it helps to read Joan Crawford’s missives), interesting times, an apology and more.
For my typewriter friends, you won’t be surprised to read that Syme upped her letter-writing game with a typewriter, namely an electric Nakajima AE-710. “If you write a lot of letters, you will find a typewriter to be perennially useful, even if you have legible handwriting,” she says. Amen to that.
She also suggests reading your letters while eating alone at a bra. “Order one glass of wine or a good sparkling water, the past dish that speaks to you, and read by the light of that one sad votive candle that they put out for you.”
Finally, she suggests storing your letters and revisiting them. “Letters are living history, emphasis on the living. Pull the boxes down from time to time and rifle through them. Pick out an old letter and reread it. Shuffle through the letters and see if there is someone you have lost touch with. Consider replying three years late to a letter whose breadcrumb trail has gone cold.”
Readers, what letters live under your couch? What fountain pens, typewriters and paper do you use to write your missives. Let a comment and let me know.
