Pen pal programs have evolved, but old-fashioned letter writing could be coming back

CONCORD, New Hampshire — In 1985, a 13-year-old girl in New Zealand spotted a pair of purple lip-shaped sunglasses in “Young Miss” magazine. In March, I drove 9,000 miles from New Hampshire to deliver them to him, fulfilling my correspondent’s decades-old request.

International Youth Service, the agency that connected us 40 years ago, is long gone, but other pen pal programs have survived – or even started in the Internet age. And even though New Zealand’s postal system has reduced door-to-door delivery days, Denmark has stopped delivering letters altogether and Canada is moving in that direction, some see signs of a resurgence in letter writing.

“The hunger is here,” said Rachel Syme, a writer for The New Yorker magazine who created a pen pal program during the COVID-19 pandemic and later published a book encouraging others to accept handwritten correspondence.

More than 15,000 people signed up for Syme’s Penpalooza project in 2020, and she always attracts hundreds of takers when she coordinates a new series of meetups every few months. She also received requests for pen pals at book signings for “Syme’s Letter Writer – A Guide to Modern Correspondence,” and the stationery stores she frequented in New York were always crowded with customers.

“People are very interested in physical and analog things right now,” she said. “I think it really has an appeal, especially for a younger generation who grew up with a phone glued to their hand, to do something that’s more tactile, slower, more intentional, more mindful, but also just disconnected from the Internet in every way.”

I was still 10 years away from connecting to the Internet when I opened my first New Zealand aerogram, a sheet of pale blue paper that served as both a writing surface and an envelope adorned with a 45-cent stamp. That missive ended with a formal “Your (hopefully) Molly Nunns,” but less than a year later she signed off with “Much, Much Love” or “Your Friend Forever.”

Letter after letter, Molly drew little hearts on the tail of the y in both of our names, asked for updates on my middle school crushes, and shared stories about her classmates and family. I could clearly imagine his life, although it was hard to imagine, in the snow of New Hampshire, celebrating Christmas in the summer.

“I think about you a lot and wonder what you are doing because you are a GREAT pen pal and I hope we never stop writing to each other and one day we can meet,” she wrote in early 1986.

Julie Delbridge, 65, formed similar friendships after joining International Pen Friends as a teenager in 1979. Writing to pen pals in more than a dozen countries from her home in Australia was such a positive experience that she began working for the organization as an adult and took over as president in 2001. Although she loved sharing photos, postcards and treats with her pen pals, it was also an experience therapy at a time when his parents were going through a bitter divorce.

“It was a hobby that I totally immersed myself in in a positive way and got a lot of enjoyment out of it,” she said. “There was an abundance of non-judgmental friendship, fun and different perspectives.”

In its 59 years of existence, IPF has provided pen pals to more than 2 million people ages 8 to 80 and older, she said. Membership peaked in the late 1990s, but increased again during the pandemic, and this year there was an increase in the number of people aged 21 to 26.

In 2021, the U.S. Postal Service sent cards and envelopes to 25,000 elementary school classes for a correspondence project, but older students are also putting pen to paper.

In Texas, a group of medical students created an anonymous pen pal program to promote peer support and personal reflection. At Villanova University, Professor Kamran Javadizadeh asks students to send each other letters as part of a literature course called “Letters, Texts, Twitter” that examines different forms of epistolary communication in literature.

“I have them put pieces of paper in envelopes, take them to the post office and mail them to each other even though they might as well give them to the person in class,” he said. “Something gets lost when you have instant communication. So I’m interested in the relationship between synchronous forms of intimacy and asynchronous forms of intimacy.”

Gordon Alley-Young, dean of communications at Kingsborough Community College in New York, believes letters are like vinyl records: They come back into fashion as young people explore a tangible medium from the past. He has both studied the history of letter writing and used it to teach empathy to students.

In an interpersonal communications course, he noticed that students analyzing case studies of relationship problems offered neutral and almost insensitive diagnoses. But when he rewrote the case studies as letters from friends and the students responded in kind, they began to share their own feelings and offer more open advice.

“We really want students to connect with what they’re watching,” he said. “And letter writing encourages that.”

An app called Slowly seeks to combine modern technology with the old-fashioned anticipation inherent in the pen pal relationship. Users send messages digitally, but delivery is delayed from an hour to several days to mimic snail mail.

“This time frame naturally encourages longer, more thoughtful messages, because you won’t just say ‘hello’ if you know you have to wait days for a response,” said co-founder JoJo Chan.

Since 2017, the app has gained 10 million users in more than 160 countries, most in their 20s and 30s. One user said he was curious about his pen pals after hearing about them from his grandparents, Chan said.

“Slowly offers them a convenient and modern way to try this experience,” she said.

Syme, however, is interested in the tangible aspects of writing a letter. Her book includes tips on paper and pens, as well as all kinds of gifts that can be stored in envelopes.

“There is joy to be had once one fully embraces the antiquated extravagance of the medium,” she writes.

But writing letters, she said in an interview, is like a swimming pool, both bright and deep. Fripperies and embellishments are irrelevant to what you actually put on the page.

“This is where I think it can become very real, very quickly,” she said.

Molly and I had been writing for 15 years by the time we met in person, spending a day together in New York during her U.S. tour in May 2000. We ran into each other in London a few years later, and in 2018 she and her family visited New Hampshire.

“Who would have thought, when we started writing in 1985, that one day you would be sitting here? It’s pretty amazing,” she said during my recent visit. “We will always have a special bond, I’m sure.”

In addition to the sunglasses, I also gave Molly a 200-page hardcover book of her letters that I scanned and printed. At 13, I could never have imagined that one day I would have searchable PDFs of our teenage doodles that could be summarized in 10 seconds by artificial intelligence. But what amazes me most is the depth of connection I felt during our tearful goodbyes at the airport.

We will definitely see each other again. Until then, much love, Holly.