The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.

Lewis Carroll

We have had to rely much more on words in these times of no hugs, no touch, no expressive body language—no, I haven’t forgotten video chats and Zoom meetings. It’s just that those ways of “seeing” can feel more like performance than actual in-person gatherings. Compared to sharing dinner with extended family in our home or having coffee with friends in places like my favorite Broadway Roastery hangout, Zoom doesn’t measure up. So words it has to be, whether in phone calls or in letters.

Does that sound rather old school? So be it. As I write ever more emails, determined to maintain some people contact, I do consider my longer emails replacement letters. They’re quicker than snail mail, of course, by far. They’re often more informal, too, defying all those rules I learned in school back in the 1960s: where to put the return address (which was part of the actual letter), how to punctuate it, how to address the recipient, what phrase to use to close the letter and introduce your signature. Conventions were stronger then, more precise. 

We wrote our letters on special paper called “stationery,” which we then folded and put into matching envelopes that had to be taken to a mail box. Letters were then, perforce, less frequent and therefore more important. Checking one’s mailbox after the mail carrier had come by was an event. The tension generated by opening a letter—with a special letter-opener—lasted longer than the two seconds required to open an email.

I remember the year my love and I nurtured our relationship almost entirely by letter. Each letter mattered. Surprisingly vivid still, over 50 years later, is my memory of sitting alone in a little carrel on the second floor of the Murray Library on the U of S campus, textbooks shoved to one side. With great deliberation, I guided my fountain pen across the lines of the paper, trying to shape the disparate details of my boring student life into something that would convey my presence to the young man who would receive those written words, one province away, in a small dorm room.

Recently, I’ve been reading the earliest volumes of my father’s diary (all that still remain). They had been written in the early 1930s, begun shortly after his arrival in Canada as a refugee from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The covers of the simple scribblers are a worn-out black, the pages yellowed and often hard to read. Mostly consisting of brief lists of farm and church activities which were almost the whole of his life then, some entries do include personal notes. A few phrases suggest that he anticipated his diary would eventually be read by others, and he wanted to leave the story of his immigrant experiences.

Chief among those was the writing and receiving of letters. Those written words were his only link with his widowed mother who had remained behind in Ukraine in 1929 when he traveled alone to Canada to find a new future. How carefully he must have chosen his words to convey hope to his family, to share of himself without letting his loneliness overwhelm him, or them. Whole afternoons were spent writing letters, hours in which homesickness must have ached throughout his entire body.

It would be at least another decade and a half before he would be able to welcome his mother, one sister, one brother, and a nephew to Canada. It would be several decades more before he would see his beloved older brother again. A fifty-year separation. I have often wondered how they held onto hope, especially since that fifty years included twelve years of imprisonment in Siberia for my uncle, years in which not a single word was exchanged between the brothers. When letters became possible again, my calm and stoic father wept with emotion. How very, very precious was each letter, written by hand on thin paper to save on postage.

All those years – all those letters. I have no way of knowing what he wrote, or what was written in the letters he received. None have survived that I know of. I wish that even one or two letters had remained, so that I might glimpse the narrative shape that my father gave his life as he progressed from foreign farm labourer to citizen owner of his own dairy farm, or that I might have some sense of who my grandmother was. Did she dare to write about losing a daughter to starvation, about the way that men from her village were simply disappeared? How would she have told her story?

I have saved some letters myself. A few of those I have written—I discovered them among my parents’ keepsakes after their deaths. It was like meeting a younger version of myself, whom I scarcely recognized. Memory, Eduardo Galeano observed, “is always changing with you while you are changing.” Yes, that is true. That is why I wish had more letters that I had written, back when letters were written on paper and kept as treasures.

Some of the letters I saved came to me from Africa, from my big brother, as I thought of him then. I was enchanted by the exotic stamps on the envelopes, fascinated with the delicate blue “airmail” paper that minimized weight. The handwriting was terrible but legible, the writer a story-teller, aware of words. Come to think of it, we both measured our words with care. Despite our very different circumstances—he in a foreign culture speaking his newly acquired French and I in the tumultuous years of learning to be a mother—we both shared and withheld. The limiting of words to four or five pages per month is a wonderful distiller of thoughts.

Now, because I write on a keyboard almost as fast as the words come to mind, my diary entries have become copious, prolix, too easy. The letters I now write to myself in order to find out what it is I think are nothing like the diary entries my father wrote, sometimes six or seven days to a page, a line or two for each. (I see them now as a kind of performative art, the very brevity and repetitiveness of the entries enacting the loneliness and stasis of the immigrant laborer’s world.) It might be well for me to pick up the fountain pen once again, fill it with dramatic turquoise (if that’s what’s required) or staid black, and consider my words before my pen touches the paper and as I shape the cursive letters.

A few days ago, on CBC’s Writers and Company, I heard a reprise of an interview with Eduardo Galeano, a Columbian writer. He had discovered, near the end of a very long and boring book about a priest’s missionary activities, a simple yet profound story: the priest had explained to the Indigenous people what paper was – it was something useful to send messages to friends far away. This seemed so important to his amazed listeners that the name they created for paper was “the skin of God.” For Galeano, that phrase, “the skin of God,” seemed like the true definition of the responsibility of a writer. Writers send messages to friends they have met and many more friends they have not yet met.

“The skin of God”: if that is what I’m writing on, then I had best choose my words with care. And love.

“A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.“

Emily Dickinson