Author name
Midweek Message
A couple of weeks ago, one of our church’s preschool teachers let me borrow a book I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It’s an epistolary novel, meaning it’s a bunch of letters written over the years that tell the story of a fictional woman named Sybil who spends her life exchanging letters—with her brother, with her daughter, with her best friend, with her neighbor, with a customer service representative at a genetic testing company, even with real-life authors like Joan Didion and Ann Padgett. It’s completely engrossing to come to know this captivating, complicated woman through her vast correspondence with so many others in her life.
In this world of social media and text messages, it can seem like sitting down and composing a letter to someone else is becoming a lost art. But for Sybil, it was a discipline that she set aside time for around 10 o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and occasionally Saturdays as well).
I can’t tell you the last time I sat down to write a letter to someone. Oh sure, I’ve penned a few thank-you cards and short notes here and there. But not the kind of longer, more reflective, expressive kinds of letters like she shared. But the book did get me thinking about some of the letters that I’ve seen or exchanged myself over the years.
My dad grew up one of six children, and for years, long before there was such a thing as email (this was in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s), his parents and siblings exchanged a circular letter they called the “Round Robin,” where one of the members of the family would start a letter, send it to the next member, who would then add their own news, and then send the composite letter on to the next member, who would add their own news, and send that on down the line, and so forth. Several of the entries in my grandfather’s daily diaries from those years included notes like “The Robin came round today.”
A few years ago, cleaning out my childhood home, I found a box containing some of the letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was in the Army, from both before and after they got married. Who knew that they were real people before I was born?
I have also kept in a box several of the lengthy emails that Tracy and I exchanged when we were dating, before I moved to Atlanta to start seminary. I often think about getting those out and rereading them. Would I still recognize the authors?
Do you have any special letters that you have kept, that you cherish? Who are they from? What is it about them that makes them so special to you?
If you could receive a letter from anyone in the world, living or dead, who would it be? And what would you hope they would share with you?
If you could write anyone a letter today, who would it be? What would you want to share with them?
