I recently read an interesting article about the poet Frank O’Hara who wrote a poetry book called “Lunch Poems”.

The article discussed these wonderful little poems about New York that O’Hara would whip out during his lunch break, usually 30 minutes or less. In plain language they captured the essence of the city around him. He never let the time interfere with his passion for writing and made writing at lunch his daily ritual.

It’s easy to allow our busy lives to be an excuse to not write letters. I have a two year old and, believe me, if anyone has a “busy” excuse it would be me. But I was so inspired by this article. Heck, I have to stop and eat lunch… why not eat for half my lunch and jot a letter for the other half? Just a quick note — love notes, thank you notes, appreciation notes, little poems. What can you write during your lunch hour?

Try it for a week and see what happens.

Remember last month when I said, “Hey everybody… let’s freak someone out!” Well, I don’t think it really freaked her out as much as completely and utterly thrilled her which is WAY BETTER than actually freaking someone out anyway.

I got email from Erin Delaney recently and she has given me permission to post it here. Ironically, you will notice that she mentions she doesn’t have my snail mail address. I was probably one of the last ones to write her (my bad) and I’m hoping the problem is that she just hasn’t received my note yet and not that it was waylaid by the U.S. Postal Service. (I might have really made the Postmaster General mad with all my marketing brouhaha from a few weeks ago.)

Anyway, here is Erin’s note. I am sure you will be as thrilled to read it as I was. How delightful. This was so much fun we’re going to do it again with another unsuspecting victim.

Wendy,

If I had your snail mail address, I would have mailed this message to you. I must say that it was one of the most exciting moments to get a call from my boss who had five letters all addressed to me from Flower Mound, TX; Chicago, IL; Pittsburgh, PA; Newport, RI; and Rochester, NY. I have to say that it was definitely a “freakout” moment! The excitement of opening each letter was overwhelming. I actually opened all of them then just looked at each trying to decide which treasure to plunder first.

Of course your dedicated readers mentioned your website, which I happily took a look at. I noticed that one of your readers, Stephanie, mentioned that she was overseas in Austria and that it posed a problem for proper timing for the full “freakout” effect, but I’d tell her that a good letter is worth the wait!

After reading each letter and reviewing your website, I was compelled to email you and let you know that I am going to write a follow up article for the Weekender based on your website, letters, and readers soon. It’d be great to talk with you (or even correspond with you) and I will keep you and your readers posted on when it will go to press.

Please let your readers know that I loved the letters and that I will respond to all of them that I received. I’d even love to correspond with even more of them! Furthermore, thanks for letting me know that letter writing hasn’t become a lost art.

Feel free to post this on your site if you’d like and check out my blog as well!

Erin L. Delaney
Read my blog at: www.erindelaney.blogspot.com

I know it’s not Friday yet… but I’m posting this right now to warn you that Friday is nearly here.

Have you heard about Postcard Friendship Friday? It’s a great little meme that people participate in every Friday. You can blog about a postcard or, actually, it seems like anything postal related. It looks like great fun and quite a few people participating.

If you want to join the crew over there, go check it out and be sure you put a link to your blog there so people will come visit you!

Are you in the mood to do something weird and fun? Let’s write Erin Delaney a letter.

Who is Erin Delaney? She writes for a publication called The Weekender and recently wrote a story about letter writing in which she encourages everyone to get busy and write letters. So, what the heck. Let’s drop Erin a note and tell her we’re in the game. Why not?

Let’s see how many people we can get to write her, just for the heck of it.

Erin Delaney
c/o The Weekender
90 E. MARKET ST.
WILKES-BARRE, PA 18703

Leave a comment if you’re playing!

April is National Card and Letter Writing Month. Giftsin24 and author Samara O’Shea are teaming up to sponsor a letter writing contest. (Ironically, they ask you to send entries by email.) You can win a $150 shopping spree at giftsin24.com and signed copies of O’Shea’s books. Worth the effort!

Press release is here: pr.com
Samara O’Shea is here: letterlover.net
Gifts in 24 is here: giftsin24.com

And you know where I am already.

Someone go enter (during the month of April) this and win so I can say it was one of my readers who won this!

Did you see this recent story in the news? It’s amazing! ABC’s Person of the Week

Go look… I’ll wait for you to come back.

Okay, if you go to the Wish Upon a Hero site you can search for wishes that involve sending cards or letters. Grant any wish you want, but be sure to also send some cards and letters while you are there. You’ll make someone’s day!

I was recently reading this post on the postal service rate increase coming up. Personally, I always hate to see it, but know it’s a necessary evil of the times.

However, this article in particular was really depressing. They said the effects of the rate increase are a “drop in the bucket”. I own my own business and it’s second nature to me to automatically think about how I could improve and optimize anything related to my business and this habit also slops over to other people’s businesses too. (And unfortunately results in me handing out a lot of unsolicited advice much to my husband’s dismay.)

So, I was thinking, what could be done to save the post office in this changing world of mail? There is an evolutionary turn happening in that industry and I thought about several things — first of all the future of letter writing if the post office is in serious trouble and second, what would I do if I was in this type of business? It’s not a simple fact of just changing some business practices… the real problem is that if you don’t have a crystal ball, how do you know how to evolve your business when your entire industry is flipping on its axis?

It’s a really tough question! Maybe we need to come up with some of our own ideas. We can march to Washington with our list and wait outside the Postmaster General’s office. It may take letter writers to save them.

What should they do? How about:

1. Celebrity endorsements like the “got milk?” campaign. Good grief, if drinking milk can be made to look cool, how hard could it be to make letter writing cool?
2. Create a more profitable division of the USPS such as a product division where you can have a lot of low wholesale cost, high profit merchandise. This has been done to a small extent, but not done nearly as well as it COULD be.
3. Have you noticed how well the U.S. Mint is doing? Take a clue from the Mint and capitalize on the needs and desires of collectors.
4. Hook the children early. A snail mailer’s club with quarterly or monthly newsletter. Get kids excited about sending letters and chances are it’s a love that will stay with them all their lives.
5. Encourage and promote mail art. Support mail artists and their showings. Marketing department needs to highlight more interesting things that go through the mail.
6. Grass roots campaigns. Utilize passionate local citizens to do your marketing for you. Enthusiastic volunteers can teach letter writing classes through local libraries — from nuts and bolts how-to classes to more creative and free-spirited methods of communicating by mail. This one has limitless possibilities and could be a good money maker since the only investment would be in coordinating the program. The cost on a local level is nearly nothing since it’s all done on a volunteer basis.
7. More school outreach, also on volunteer basis.
8. Form an unpaid advisory commission of passionate and enthusiastic and knowledgeable letter writers to meet 2-3 times per year to help plan and design low-cost, high return programs.

Okay, those are my ideas… please add your own in the comments section. If you will do your part and help brainstorm ideas I will put them all in a professional format and petition to Postmaster General to heed our call for change at the USPS. Let’s do it in time for the rate hike in May. Let’s get to work!

We’ve made it through to the last day of our ten-day challenge! I hope you found some of these challenges useful or interesting or helpful. After today we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

This last challenge is dedicated to holiday thanks. It’s very easy in this busy time to forget to properly thank those who are generous to us. As I have said before, much of making letter writing easy is having some systems in place to create an environment that encourages jotting a note here and there.

For your holiday unwrapping, you use the standard trick that people use at bridal and baby showers. Have a designated note taker to record the gifts as they are unwrapped. Jot down the name of the person giving the gift, who it was given to and what the gift is. Add to the list all the money you received from cards that came before Christmas as well.

With this information you can quickly compile your thank you notes. Here is a very easy formula for building a thank you note. Modify this as needed:

Dear [Giver],

Thank you so much for the [name of gift]. I really love it. [insert one sentence to indicate how you'll use it or why you love it]. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity.

Happy Holidays (or whatever expression you like here),
your signature

Here is why I recommend doing thank you notes this way. First of all, putting in the actual name of the gift and what you like about it personalizes the note so people don’t think you’re just sending the same canned message to everyone. Second it makes it look like you’ve taken time to actually think about the gift. You’re completing the circle of giving. You give a gift to me (an act of generosity) and I give something back to you (an act of sincere gratitude). It’s a closed circuit that leaves everyone feeling good about the interaction. Have you ever gotten a great gift that you didn’t write a thank you note for? I think it makes people feel a little crummy on the inside, so don’t let that happen to you!

Now for the big Christmas quandary. How do you thank someone for a gift you don’t really like? No problem. The thing about gifts is you’re thanking the person for their thoughtfulness, not so much for the item. So you can say, “thank you so much for the purple sweatshirt that’s two sizes too big and has battery-powered talking dinosaurs on the front that makes my hooters look twelve sizes larger than they actually are. It makes me so happy to know you were thinking of me.” Don’t ever, ever, ever say you love something if you don’t, but DO express how you feel about the person caring enough to buy or make you a gift.

Try to get your thank you notes out by the end of the year, but remember… it’s never too late to say thanks. Better late than never.

Letters are a great way to focus our thoughts and express our feelings in the calmness and comfort of our own environments.

Do you have an issue with someone that is unresolved? Something that should be said that hasn’t been said? Take today’s challenge as an opportunity to do just that.

Take a quiet hour with paper and pen and pour yourself out on paper. Don’t censor yourself. Commit to saying everything you want to say, but get it all out. This is not a letter to mail, but rather an exercise to focus your thoughts into a coherent message.

Later if you really do want to express yourself to the person, you can use this letter as an outline. Pull from it the important points for your “real” letter. Take this emotionally charged letter and draw from it the thoughts you want to express with tact, compassion and an appropriate level of energy. Remember that words on paper cannot be undone. Never send mail when you’re upset. Always wait 24-48 hours before sending an emotional letter on its way.

Some people say you should never put negative words into a letter, but I say it’s an important and vital part of our nature to communicate the good and the bad. The trick is how you do it. If you can follow the basic principals of human care and kindness, you won’t write a letter that’s a scathing diatribe to your mother-in-law. You’ll remember she is a person just like you and me (only louder and more bossy and opinionated and overbearing and superior to you in every way).

We’re nearly at the end of our challenge and it’s the season to be jolly! Is there anything weighing on your mind that will keep you from enjoying your holidays to the fullest? Explore this idea of making peace with yourself or with others.

Below are a couple of links for web sites that are in the spirit of today’s challenge. These can also be utilized in lieu of the challenge as described above. The point of these challenge days is to step out of our routines and try a few things that might be new to us. Enjoy!

PostSecret
Letters We Never Sent

As I wrote the title of this post I broke out into a little bit of and unladylike sweat. You might have broken out in a sweat reading it if you’re like me… miserably disorganized and lost in a whirlwind of swirling papers mixed with broken pens and crumpled candy wrappers. Hopefully you’re better than that and if you are I certainly admire you for it. (That is not to say I will not mock you now and again, but it’s really all in good fun and I don’t mean anything by it.)

I must say, though, there’s one thing I organize well — my letter writing stuff. I have a great setup for my writing stuff and also for letters I have received. Today’s challenge does not involve writing letters, but creating the best possible environment for letter writing. Doing that will make it easy for you to dash off notes on the fly, elegantly and easily.

All you need for this challenge is a small plastic tub or a storage box. It can be a shoe box, but I prefer one that will at least have an interior space of about 9×12. You can go with something smaller if you don’t use 8.5×11 paper for your writing. It’s nice to get something that will fit on your bookshelf for easy access. If it’s pretty all the better!

In the box you need to assemble the following things:

• 1-2 notepads
• handful of quarter-sized envelopes (4.25×5.5) and a handful of #10 envies
• a selection of blank or any-occasion cards with envelopes
• a selection of specific occasion cards if you like to use those
• 2-3 of your favorite pens
• an envelope containing a sheet of first class stamps and a sheet of postcard stamps
• a handful of attractive postcards
• address book or a sheet with a list of addresses
• optional: stickers, rubber stamps or other little goodies for decorating envelopes

This is everything you’ll need to write a letter at any given moment. The trick is to keep the box in a place that is easy to pull out and use. The other important thing is to keep the box stocked up! If you run out of anything in there, the system breaks down. You don’t want to have to go find something in the middle of writing. It breaks the flow.

The second thing I like to do is a mini-organizer that you can use as your traveling correspondence kit. What I personally use is a small canvas zippered notepad case that’s about 6×9. Inside it has a yellow notepad and a pen holder. There are pockets on the inside and outside. Be sure whatever you get has a zipper or very secure enclosure so nothing can fall out. It needs enough pockets for stamps, stickers, 2-3 quarter-sized envelopes, and 2-3 postcards. In this I also have a printed list of a dozen or so people I like to send postcards to when I’m traveling. I don’t like taking my address book with me on trips in case I lose it. The whole thing is about the size of a large-format paperback book, but thinner and fits great in a backpack or carry-on.

Once you get used to having both of these things, you’ll love it.

I like hearing how people organize the letters they want to keep because if you get lots of mail it quickly becomes a chronic problem. Many people use storage boxes and stack their letters in those which is fine. It keeps the dust out and they stack nicely. I personally don’t like that system because I like to periodically go through and look at letters I have received. (Like a pirate running her greedy fingers through that trunk of gold doubloons!) With the first system mentioned you have to open all the envelopes and unfold the letters to find what you’re looking for. To me it’s just an annoyance.

The letters I keep go into plastic sleeves (archival quality). I unfold them flat and staple the envelope to the back of the letter so that when I look at the sleeve the letter is face-up on the top and when you turn the sleeve over you see the FRONT of the envelope with the address, stamp and postmark showing. The great thing about this system is you can scan the first page of the letter without having to do anything. And if your correspondent didn’t put the date on the letter you can flip over to the back and see the date on the postmark.

I put all these in binders and keep them on the bookshelf. You can organized the binders in whatever way is comfortable for you. I keep Dad in his own binder and Mom in her own. Miscellaneous family members go in one binder together. Friends go in another binder and when those build up to multiple volumes they just end up being chronologically organized. If one friend writes enough she’ll eventually break out to her own binder and I’ll pull all her letters out of the group binder and keep them in chrono order in her new “home”.

You know, when I write it all out like this it sort of makes me sound a little bit compulsive, but it’s actually not as fussy as it sounds. If only you knew how unfussy I am. In fact, any friends of mine who might be reading this are probably laughing their heads off right about now. Like I said, this is the ONLY thing about me that is organized.

How do you organize your letter writing environment? I’m always looking for great new ideas. I hope you will share them with me!