The email landed on my desk in the midst of dozens of other emails destined for the trash can. But this one grabbed my attention with the subject: “Oregonians Invited To Write Letters to Strangers in April.”
I was reaching for my pen before I even opened it. From there it just got better. Not only was I invited to write a letter to a stranger, I was invited to write “…about something you’ve repaired: a circumstance, an injustice, a misunderstanding, yourself. A valiant fix or a failed one.”
Naturally, I immediately began thinking about the things I have attempted to repair in my life, which brought me to what might have been the biggest fix of all — attempted, no less, via a letter to a stranger. That letter went out nearly 30 years ago. I closed it by saying if she didn’t want to hear from me, I understood and would not write again. I don’t know that I ever wrote a personal letter to another stranger. But I was sure intrigued by the invite to do so now.
That email came from Oregon Humanities. This is the fourth year they’ve hosted the letter exchange. It works like this: you send a letter (one to two pages is recommended, but no more than what one stamp will cover), a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE) and the signed permission form, available at oregonhumanities.org, to: Dear Stranger, 813 SW Alder Street, Suite 702, Portland, OR 97205.
The postmark deadline is May 8.
Once the letters are in, the Dear Stranger staff will take your letter and put it in a SASE from someone else who lives in a different part of the state. Then, they put someone else’s letter in your SASE and ship it back to you. It’s important that you don’t put your contact information in the initial letter. If you want to continue corresponding with the letter writer, send your reply to the Dear Stranger program. They’ll forward it. From there on you can communicate with each other directly.
Oregon Humanities decided to do this as a way for readers of their magazine, published three times a year, to participate.
“Part of the reason we wanted to do this through the mail rather than encouraging people to send emails is that it’s always nice to get mail,” said Ben Waterhouse, communications coordinator at Oregon Humanities. “There’s always something personal about getting a handwritten letter. We don’t require that they are handwritten, but it is personally touching getting a handwritten letter.”
(Assuming that, unlike mine, your handwriting is legible.)
Participants have come from all over the state, except the farthest southeastern corner. The majority of letter writers tend to be women over the age of 40, Waterhouse said.
That doesn’t surprise me. For years, I wrote letters all the time. I wrote pages and pages in long hand sitting at the kitchen table, filling in the most mundane details of my life.
And then came computers and email and, well, you might say the pen ran dry. But I’ve always missed the days of opening the mailbox and finding a personal letter inside.
An unopened letter carries with it all sorts of possibilities. Opened, each line is a revelation, a communication, personal and private. And no matter how miles separate the writer and reader, the experience is a shared one.
To this day, I have letters from my mom, my sister, my niece, my grandma and an old beau that I have carried with me for decades, stretching back to 1979 when I left my Pennsylvania hometown for Alaska. Every once in a while, I’ll pull out the old suitcase where they are stored and reread them; and every time, I’ll notice something I hadn’t remembered, see something that feels utterly new. And across the years and space, we are once again connected.
Letters from past letter exchanges have addressed all sorts of subject, Waterhouse said.
“Last year’s prompt was quandary,” he said. “We saw very heavy writing, the death of parents, serious illness, but also light-hearted stuff. We heard from quite a few people who’ve had strong ongoing exchanges with people introduced through this.”
As did I after my first letter all those years ago to the stranger. I had no idea what to expect from that letter, but not long after I sent it out, I received a letter back.
And so began the relationship with the sister I never knew until that first letter.
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