#1: Let's send some mail!

The start of something beautiful

Jun 09, 2023

Y’all - welcome to the inaugural email for Snail Mail Sweethearts. I’m so pumped to share this journey with you! It’s gonna be a blast. Every month, I’ll be doing the templates and prompts right along with you, so even from day one, you’ve got someone with you every step of the way.

Without further ado, welcome to the show!

The blush (and burn) of summer

Summer’s here (more or less). It’s so many folks’ favorite season, and between beaches, iced coffee, and jasmine, I get it.

But honestly? Most of the saddest passages of my life have unfolded against backdrops of endless pools, sweat dripping in the crooks of elbows, and those breathless blue skies that rip you open and slurp you clean. Even though it’s beautiful, I think it can be a deceptively lonely time of year, too.

It probably doesn’t help that summer is when everyone you know is traveling; routines are upended, and our closest friends are out of town. If you’re on social media, you’re also constantly evading the sense that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than you and maximizing their summer while you toil in an office.

You ask me, summer - beautiful and sweltering and vast - is the perfect time to reconnect with someone, even in the smallest way.

What we’re making

The kind of mail we’re sending today is one of my favorite ways to connect with someone when I’m far away. It’s very simple, takes less than five minutes, and brings the place I’m at right to them:

We’re mailing a special someone a few snips of the nature right outside our doors.

a hand spinning three small flowers against a backdrop of grass

Grab a few pieces of something outside - a leaf, a flower, a blade of grass - and slip it in an envelope. Even if you live in a city, a weed here or a blade of grass there can make a memorable and sweet little bouquet (and if you really don’t have a lone dandelion or city tree, send just a note asking your friendo to pretend there’s nature in there). You can affix your findings to a piece of paper if you’re a tidy kinda guy, but I usually send them loose in an envelope.

Once you got your pieces of nature exactly how you want ‘em, grab a piece of scrap paper. Post-it-sized works. Don’t worry too much about sending a long letter; sometimes the idea of filling a whole dang A4 piece of paper can be enough to keep us from sending snail mail to begin with.

So say whatever comes to mind, but keep it brief. A thoughtful sentence about where you are and that you’re thinking of them does the trick more than a half-page of anxiously filled writing does.

Who we’re sending it to

Faraway friendos

Obviously, you’re a free agent. You can mail this to whoever the hell you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do. Send it to the whole of NASA, send it to Donald Glover, even (but for real, probably don’t send it to a government agency. They may have questions).

Basically, you can mail it to whoever your lil heart desires, but when I mail a slice of nature, I send it to someone far away who I particularly wish was with me. In general, the further the person is, the more satisfying it is to send and receive this kind of note. Once, when my friend moved to China from Florida, I included a few local bits of foliage in my next letter to her as a lil reminder of her home state.1

This time, I sent the flowers I picked to my niece. She’s particularly wanted to visit France and hasn’t been able to yet. For now, at least, I got to send some of France to her :}.

While you’re mailin’, listen to this:

Guarda Come Dondolo by Edoardo Vianello

(If you don’t have Spotify, listen to it on YouTube here.)

I’ve been stuck on the Master of None soundtrack lately, and this song is a perfect bop to listen to while gathering those scraps of outside to put in ye olde envelope.

And that’s it! Our first snail mail adventure together took you less than the length of that song, I hope, and you’re already adding a little love to someone’s mailbox.

Let me know how it went:

And if you want to receive a handmade piece of postcard art, vote on the upcoming fiction prompts for your monthly dash of prose, receive a bi-annual fiction zine, AND get monthly templates for mailable art projects, consider upgrading your subscription today:

A note on asking for someone’s address

If you’re new to the snail mail game, it can feel awkward af to ask for someone’s address, but in my years of sending a truly bozo amount of postcard art, love notes, and baubles, nobody has ever once been upset that I asked for their address. For all my (fellow) anxious bbs, though, here’s a prompt to make the text/DM painless:

Snail Mail Sweethearts