In 1985, a 13-year-old girl in New Zealand spotted a pair of purple, lip-shaped sunglasses in “Young Miss” magazine. In March, I travelled 9,000 miles from New Hampshire to deliver them to her, finally fulfilling my pen pal’s decades-old request.
International Youth Service, the agency that matched us up 40 years ago, has long since folded, but other pen pal programs have survived, or even begun during, the internet age. And even though New Zealand’s postal system has reduced home delivery days, Denmark has stopped delivering letters altogether, and Canada is moving in that direction, some see signs of a letter-writing resurgence.
“The hunger is there,” said Rachel Syme, a writer for The New Yorker magazine who created a pen pal program during the COVID-19 pandemic and later published a book encouraging others to take up handwritten correspondence.
More than 15,000 people signed up for Syme’s Penpalooza project in 2020, and she still gets hundreds of takers when she coordinates a new round of matchmaking every few months. She also gets requests for pen pals at book signings for “Syme’s Letter Writer – A Guide to Modern Correspondence,” and the stationery stores she frequents in New York City are always crowded with customers.
Julie Delbridge, 65, fostered friendships after joining International Pen Friends as a teenager in 1979. Writing to pen pals in more than a dozen countries from her home in Australia was such a positive experience that she began working for the organisation as an adult and took over as its president in 2001.
“It was a pastime that I totally immersed myself into in a positive way and gained a lot of enjoyment from,” she said.
Over its 59-year history, IPF has provided pen pals to more than 2 million people ages 8 to 80+, she said. Membership peaked in the late 1990s but surged again during the pandemic, and this year, there’s been an increase in people ages 21-26 joining.
An app called Slowly now seeks to combine modern technology with the old-fashioned anticipation inherent to the pen pal relationship. Users send messages digitally, but delivery is delayed from an hour to several days to mimic snail mail.
“This delay naturally encourages longer, more thoughtful messages because you wouldn’t just say ‘hi’ if you know you have to wait days for a reply,” said cofounder JoJo Chan.
Since 2017, the app has gained 10 million users in more than 160 countries, mostly in their 20s and 30s. One user said he was curious about pen pals after hearing about them from his grandparents, Chan said.
Syme, however, is all about the tangible aspects of letter writing. Her book includes advice on paper and pens, plus all kinds of goodies that can be tucked into envelopes.
But letter writing, she said in an interview, is like a swimming pool, both shiny and deep. The frippery and embellishments don’t matter in comparison to what you actually put on the page.
“That’s where I think it can get very real, very quickly,” she said.
Associated Press