A few months ago, when the rules had been sufficiently relaxed to allow friends to sit together outside, Liz Maguire had coffee with a woman she had never met. The pair had already been communicating for months, and quickly fell into easy conversation. Later on, this woman tweeted about their meeting, to which another woman replied: “You met Liz Maguire? As in the Liz Maguire?”.
The Liz Maguire is a 27-year-old American expat living in Dublin. Though undoubtedly a celebrity in her chosen field, she is not a professional, but that is simply because she is not paid to do what she loves, which is to write letters to strangers.
At last count, Maguire had 88 pen pals on the go, scattered throughout Europe, Canada, the US and Singapore. She keeps track of their correspondence using a binder system sorted by month. She also collects historical letters, which she keeps in folders. Speaking to me over Zoom, she leans forward to reveal a tall white shelving unit groaning under their combined weight. If that wasn’t enough, in January she started sending birthday cards to strangers, too. By mid-February, she had already sent 60. “People have messaged me to say that my birthday card was only the second acknowledgement of the day they had.”
Pen-palling is “an endurance sport”, says Maguire, who on the morning we speak has sent seven handwritten letters. “Evenings and weekends are my busiest time. Then, if I apply myself, my hand can get about five or six four-pagers out. So that’s 25 pages a day. That’s a lot – especially as our generation aren’t usually able to write like this.” As a millennial also weaned on word processors, I nod along.
To write in that quantity, you need the right pen, Maguire explains. She prefers rollerballs (cheap, less smudging), which bear the names of various corporate venues possibly related to her marketing day job. “To me, the physical act of writing a letter is a creative space away from work,” says Maguire. It is also a necessary one, given how hard it is to meet new people right now. “It is strange, how you learn to communicate almost entirely through phone or email, how deeply impersonal that is.”
Like many pen-pallers, she won’t divulge much about her correspondents (this seems to be a code of honour among everyone I speak to), but “connection” is at the heart of what she does. Maguire and her pen pals share stories, thoughts, books, Post-it notes, stickers and poetry. It’s upbeat stuff; the virus knits them together, yet is rarely mentioned.
The pandemic has been good for pen pals. Before 2020, written correspondence was as good as dead; what the telephone had weakened, the internet finished off. Yet a year on, the very thing that promised to broaden our world and nourish connection has left us feeling more isolated. My own feelings towards my phone have changed radically. WhatsApp is good for gossip, FaceTime for countering family alienation and Skype for when all else fails. Email is invaluable but there is something about the immediacy that crushes any thoughtfulness or intimacy. Phone calls are wonderful, but once you hang up, that’s it, you cannot hold them in your hands or go over them again.
Letter-writing feels like a solution, though with little to do during lockdowns, there may have seemed little to write about. But letters are good for us – humans thrive on activity and connectivity, and feel thwarted in the absence of those things. Letters offer a reprieve from the sameyness of lockdown, which made us simultaneously time rich and connection poor.
During the pandemic, letters have become more than simply a means of connection; they are first-person accounts of history as it unfolds, says David Russell, an English literature professor at the University of Oxford. “Letter-writing puts you into a speculative mode. You don’t have immediate access to the other person’s situation, and that produces great pieces of writing, which is why some of the best essays in literature start as letters.” Without facial expressions, intonation and gesticulation, the medium becomes the message. “Emails are immediate and instrumental. They have the strange effect of flattening the information they carry,” he says.
For my generation, writing to pen pals was part of growing up. I was ghosted by my first and only correspondent, possibly because I sent him a card covered with lipstick kisses. I was eight. But I still remember the visceral thrill of receiving a letter about what he’d seen on He-Man or Live & Kicking. After that, I mostly wrote to my family. Separated for several reasons (including divorce), my mother and I would write each other long letters. An artist, she would paint watercolour ducks on hers, and I would cry reading them, usually smudging the ducks. Later, I wrote to boyfriends intermittently, but I hadn’t written a proper letter until last August when my mother died during the first wave of the pandemic.
She didn’t die of Covid, but we have since learned that the virus complicated things. Mourning has been transformed by the pandemic, we all know that, but it still horrifies me to think of her death as a 2020 plot twist, a data point. All the things that make death vaguely manageable were out of reach – the external help, the care, a bearable funeral where people didn’t have to wear masks and which wasn’t indecently stripped back. She got sick when I was in labour and died 14 months later. Time prepares you for death, but it does not soften the loss. I have learned that it gets harder as time goes on, and that isolation has a way of sharpening the pain. Put simply, stuck at home, there is no new way to express or explore it.
On the days I feel sad, I have no one to talk to except my partner. Grief is not something you proffer in a text. I tried posting something on Instagram, but as a medium for loss on that scale, I found it almost insulting. As one cousin said in his letter to me, to write on paper felt correct, and true. From the paper, to the stains and the handwriting, it is impossible to send an impersonal letter.
My own letters started as thank yous in the weeks after the funeral. I would reply to texts late at night so as to prevent a back and forth, but on paper, words coiled out of me. Thank yous for the flowers. For the frozen meals. For the cards. For being part of my mother’s life, or even mine. Then I started sending cards to people I didn’t know. Not strangers, but cousins, my mother’s childhood friends that I had only just heard about.