After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut’s Box 58 at the Newtown Municipal Center was inundated with letters, cards, and ephemera. It was as if the letters—a “museum of grief” as Peter Applebome of The New York Times called them—represented the unbearable weight of losing 26 children and teachers. The estimated four shipping containers of written correspondence Newtown received became an additional burden for a town already moored in grief.
Ultimately, Newtown residents such as illustrator and designer Ross MacDonald, homemaker Yolie Moreno, former reference librarian Andrea Zimmermann, town historian Daniel Cruson, and many others, raced to photograph and preserve the half a million handwritten letters and cards sent, some of the most heart-rending letters written and illustrated by children, before they were incinerated. Thanks to volunteers, nothing sent to Newtown was thrown away before preservation, and what remained afterwards was incinerated and converted into “sacred soil,” ash that will be incorporated into concrete or other building materials for a future memorial in honor of the 26 lives lost.
“You know, in some ways there is a danger that some of that shock and horror is going to be forgotten,” MacDonald said in a 2013 video on Mother Jones, one outlet which helped Newtown create a small digital archive on Tumblr. Other, larger archives include the Connecticut State Library, whose 64 archival boxes house 250,000 children’s drawings, poems, and handwritten letters, and the Xerox-created website, Embracing Newtown, which digitally showcases over 5,000 letters and cards.
As other massacres occurred (and continue to occur) after Newtown—Paris, Manchester, Las Vegas, Sunderland Springs, Parkland, the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh—letters continue to pour in. And while many are rightly concerned that we, as a society, have become desensitized to mass violence and the agonizing death toll, the letters sent to the people and towns who survive these terrible events show another side of the story.
Now, in the 21st century, as letter-writing culture becomes rarer, we are in the process of figuring out what our intellectual heritage might be once the flame of intimate, flowing letters fades out.
“Thoughts and prayers” are not sufficient, any more so than all the letters and cards Newtown received. But perhaps this outpouring of written support is indicative of a sea change, or, at the very least, a sign that people have not forgotten the simple and cathartic act of expressing love and sorrow through letters.
What makes Newtown’s outpouring of letters especially noteworthy is we stand before a crossroads of a letter-writing culture and a status-and-text-composing culture. As linguist James Paul Gee pointed out in his book Literacy and Education, we have been here before when we lost the ability to recite epic poems, a skill very few of us still possess or would think to lament, when we began writing dialogues and treatises. The oral culture of epic poets became the written culture of philosopher kings: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Plato, Gee writes, “was one of the first great writers of Greek civilization.” The bard, as it were, was replaced as the keeper of knowledge when written prose emerged. Now, in the 21st century, as letter-writing culture becomes rarer, we are in the process of figuring out what our intellectual heritage might be once the flame of intimate, flowing letters fades out.
So, who writes letters these days? Prison systems, to be sure, have a long and storied past with letter-writing culture. The Bible’s books of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon were all written during Paul’s first Roman incarceration. The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, which details the former president of South Africa’s 27-year-long imprisonment, were published just this summer. Black American radical George Jackson’s Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1971) was a best-seller in African American and leftist circles when it was published. The Letters of E. B. White (1976) has been a perennial favorite among the literati. And letter-writing has been used as a literary device by writers as diverse as Alice Walker (The Color Purple), C. S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters), Samuel Richardson (Pamela and Clarissa), James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), to name only a few.
Perhaps one of the most well-known letters written from prison is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 7,000-word “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In King’s letter, written on April 16, 1963, he reminded Americans “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Our ability to not only write such beautiful letters as King’s, but also to memorize much of anything, let alone quoting St. Augustine, the Bible, and John Bunyan’s 1678 Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress without the aid of Google, becomes starkly apparent while re-reading King’s letter.
Yet, 55 years after King’s letter challenged the Birmingham clergyman who decried his “outside agitator” status and the problem of white, do-nothing moderates, companies such as JPay are vying to replace American prisoners’ reliance on the postal service with e-card and email kiosks and tablets, but for a much higher cost. In August 2018, Victoria Law of Wired Magazine reported that JPay “make(s) millions charging prisoners to send an email.” JPay uses a surge-pricing model with the “stamps” it requires inmates and their families and friends to use to send one page of writing, including pictures and videos. Sending a Mother’s Day e-card, for example, costs more than sending an e-card on other days, Law reported.
While many inmates and loved ones still use the postal service for correspondence, opportunistic companies might endanger letter-writing even more.
“Though e-messaging companies compare their business to postage stamps, in reality traditional mail—in which a person can send several photos or five pieces of paper for a single set price—is a much better deal,” Law wrote. The problem, however, for some families with loved ones in the penal system is that some facilities (who also profit from prisoners using JPay) are now placing a prohibition on mailed greeting cards. So, while many inmates and loved ones still use the postal service for correspondence, opportunistic companies might endanger letter-writing even more.
Yet, the collectors, those who gather and sometimes sell the letters of infamous criminals, will continue writing with pen-and-paper and actual stamps for as long as they are able. Amanda Howard has written to some of Australia, England, and the United States’ most well-known serial killers for the past two decades. Howard writes approximately 55 serial killers, including the late Richard Ramirez, The Night Stalker, whose home invasions, assaults, rapes, and 14 murders were described by the sentencing judge as “cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.” Howard, who is a true-crime author and has been dubbed “The Serial Killer Whisperer,” is not alone in writing serial killers.
In 2014, Christopher Duett detailed the reasons why he writes almost 50 murderers and serial killers for Vice Magazine. “Former FBI profiler John Douglas said, ‘To understand an artist, you also have to look at their art,’” Duett wrote. “And to truly understand a crime, you have to take a long, hard look at the criminal.” Likewise, criminal psychologist Emilie Cassinelli corresponded with British-Scottish serial killer Ian Brady, who murdered five children between the ages of 10 and 17 years of age with his girlfriend Myra Hindley in the mid-1960s, to better study Brady’s motivations. Cassinelli shared the letters she received from Brady in an attempt to break the code she thinks he was using before his death in 2017.
One of the hallmarks of letter-writing culture, something archivists remind researchers of when they hold or view a letter, is that the letter before them was written by a real person, the ink in someone’s unique hand. This immediacy is awe-inspiring when holding, say, an 1861 letter from President Abraham Lincoln, but when holding the letters of someone like Brady or Bundy, emotions are mixed. As Cassinelli said, “When I look through the letters, knowing that Brady has had his hands on them and written them, it feels eerie.”
One of the hallmarks of letter-writing culture, something archivists remind researchers of when they hold or view a letter, is that the letter before them was written by a real person, the ink in someone’s unique hand.
Society’s fascination with serial killers, perhaps, is rooted in an attempt to humanize, to better understand what prompts someone to do, repeatedly, the unthinkable. Therefore, letters to serial killers become cryptograph and key to doing our damnedest to reconcile some of humanity’s worst behavior.
There is, of course, an even more sordid side to writing serial killers in prison. Mark Sennen, a crime writer, wrote that there are scores of women who are aroused by serial killers, which might explain why killers like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson received hundreds of letters from “groupies” or why Parkland High School shooter Nikolas Cruz received stacks of fan mail and love letters at the Broward County jail in March of this year. There is even a term for such dark, twisted longing, hybristophilia, or “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome.”
Yet, as one goes down the contemporary letter-writing rabbit hole, it becomes apparent that most everyday people do not write letters to serial killers, or anyone, for that matter. Those who still write tend to inhabit the margins of society.
The Amish still write circle letters, whereby one person writes a letter added to a bundle of other letters of similar interests and then passed onto the next person on the list. Children still have pen pals, though when I taught sixth grade at the turn of the 21st century, my students used ePals and never received the postmarks and airmail mailers I did from Mexico, Germany, and Australia.
As one goes down the contemporary letter-writing rabbit hole, it becomes apparent that most everyday people do not write letters to serial killers, or anyone, for that matter. Those who still write tend to inhabit the margins of society.
Nishta J. Mehra, writer and author of Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion, still writes letters, but her purpose in writing them in our ever-connected world has changed.
“Since most of the people I send letters to are also connected to me on social media, they already know the major news in my life,” Mehra wrote by email. “What they don’t know are the subtleties, and the bigger picture of how I’m thinking about and feeling inside of my life.”
Part of the allure of sitting down to write a letter to friends, Mehra said, is “to be perfectly honest, sometimes I don’t even know that bigger picture until I sit down and try to capture it in a letter.” The intimacy, beauty, and accountability of writing a letter to a specific audience, however rare, can break through the worst writer’s block and provide insight into situations and feelings we may not even realize until we write a letter.
And while some do genuinely lament the end of an era, and the fact that we will likely never have the some 20,000 letters like the ones Voltaire sent to Catherine the Great, Rousseau, Diderot, and d’Alembert, in many ways this slow-death of letter-writing is also the natural sequence of human communication. The question then becomes if letters become more and more rare, how do we preserve our present for the future?
Part of the answer to this question is to consider how we view losing the literacy of letter-writing and -reading. “[W]e are acutely aware of some losses caused by digital media since digital media are newer, the losses more recent, and we stand at transition between literate culture and digital culture,” wrote linguist James Paul Gee and literacy professor Elisabeth R. Hayes in their 2011 book, Language and Learning in the Digital Age. “This theme of loss looms large when people discuss technology.” Yet, Gee and Hayes posited, we also need to discuss the gains of an ever-evolving language and literacy.
“Since most of the people I send letters to are also connected to me on social media, they already know the major news in my life,” Mehra wrote by email. “What they don’t know are the subtleties, and the bigger picture of how I’m thinking about and feeling inside of my life.”
While the future of letter-writing culture is unclear, a culture the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum preserves, the ability to connect with our friends and family in the here and now really does make the loss of intimate written correspondence somewhat bearable. While losing handwritten love letters in exchange for sexting and unsolicited “dick pics” appalls, this sentimental viewpoint likely does not accurately portray where language is headed. The trick, perhaps, is reconciling how to balance instant, sometimes profane, communication with more contemplative thoughts and actions.
Archivists intimately understand the changing nature of preserving our history, which is how I find myself discussing the importance of letters at a large wooden table at the Library & Research Center of the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, Missouri. Archivists Molly Kodner and Jaime Bourassa said, in fact, the number of letters they have received so far from those who were in the Korean and Vietnam wars, for instance, are dwindling as compared to the written records they have for the earlier world wars and the Civil War.
“I’ve said many times my job, our job, is to read other people’s mail and diaries,” head archivist Kodner said. “I mean, that’s what it is. And it makes me sound like a totally voyeuristic person, which I’m not.”
“I realize letter-writing is a lost art, but I’m not writing letters,” Kodner said. “So, I’m creating, I’m adding to the problem, really.”
“But is it a problem?” I asked. “Or is it just a natural passing of technology and traditions?”
“It is a natural passing of technology and traditions, but …”
“I was just going to say I think some of the things people used to communicate in letters they do online now,” Bourassa, an associate archivist, said. “So, today’s Internet Archive is going to sweep up blogs and other things. This kind of information will be preserved.”
“Oh my god,” Kodner said. “It’s moving so fast.”
Oddly enough, Kodner’s observation about reading other people’s diaries and letters points out a paradox of our time—while it may seem like many of us overshare everything about our daily lives on social media, the digital record we keep now is one that will pose serious preservation challenges for archivists of the future. The Museum of Obsolete Media, a do-it-yourself collection by librarian Jason Curtis, who lives in Shropshire county in the United Kingdom, speaks to one of the biggest hurdles digital archivists face—the rapid pace by which media become outdated and, in many instances, hard to access down the road, not to mention the unstable shelf-life of the vessels we save our writing on (bygone floppy disks, Zip disks, MiniDiscs, et cetera). What I wrote on my college email, Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook account, which I deleted in 2010, no longer exist. Like most people, I never thought to archive it.
Neither did Phil Lyons, who serves as the Vice Chancellor for Administrative and Student Life Services at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. In 2001, Lyons wondered what had happened to writer and Merry Prankster, Ken Kesey, and decided to reach out to a literary and countercultural idol.
In a leap of faith, Lyons found Kesey’s son’s production company, Key-Z Productions, online, sent an email to Zane Kesey, and never in a million years expected to hear back from one of his favorite authors and a great influencer of one of Lyons’ favorite bands, the Grateful Dead. At the time, Lyons hoped to entice Kesey as an honored guest of Saint Louis University’s freshman “great book” lecture series.
“I think one of the things that drove me to sending this message was Kesey was off the radar and there are these people who are still alive, but we haven’t heard from in a long while,” Lyons said by phone. “We’d love to hear their story, and I truly wondered if he was just biding his time in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.”
While Lyons corresponded with Kesey by email, his intentions are ones many letter-writers recognize. Sending letters is an act of defiance, of not forgetting the past and those notable people who may no longer be in the spotlight. Unfortunately, for Lyons, his timing with Kesey was off. While Kesey had agreed to fly to St. Louis to give a lecture on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he died from surgery complications on November 10, 2001. Of course, Lyons did not think to digitally archive his email correspondence with Kesey nor can he find his printed-out correspondence with the psychedelic author. Lyons remains hopeful, nonetheless, that eventually his emails with Kesey will be found.
Without letters, which were also lost or not yet discovered by unimaginable numbers, who will think to digitally archive family photos, videos, emails, and the like and then donate them to historical societies of the future? Will proprietary Facebook timelines, private Instagram feeds, and blogs of yore be accessible to archivists? What exactly will replace the cursive found in letters and journals that two of Kodner’s prospective interns could not read? And while cursive handwriting is still being taught in some schools, there is a very real gap between people who can read the Declaration of Independence in the framers’ hand and those who cannot, though does it really matter when the transcribed version of the Declaration is readily available online?
Without letters, which were also lost or not yet discovered by unimaginable numbers, who will think to digitally archive family photos, videos, emails, and the like and then donate them to historical societies of the future?
Emojis, Kodner and Bourassa said, may replace the love letters they sometimes discover, like the ones Kodner found of Captain James Love’s Civil-War-era letters to his beloved Molly. Perhaps there will be GIFs that somehow capture the earnestness and intimacy of the couple’s 166 love letters, but, somehow, I doubt it.
There have been dark periods in history before, when most of society were pre-literate, when only the privileged few could read and write. Perhaps where we are headed in our digital communication resembles souped-up petroglyphs. Take, for example, when a year ago, the Library of Congress announced they would no longer archive every tweet or opinion thread on Twitter, which they had been amassing at a rate of half a billion tweets a day since 2006. These archived tweets do not even include images, videos, or linked content—just text. As our historical record evolves from letters written in quill and ink to status updates, what we will mourn remains to be seen.
But this much is certain: While letter-writing culture is not dead yet, trying to return home to letter-writing is impossible. We cannot go home. We can only go on.
