This Letter Never Sent  

No matter the genre, some of our favorite writing has come in the form of letters. There’s Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; there are ‘epistles’ by any number of poets. Take Kenneth Koch who devoted an entire collection to the form called New Addresses.  Anna Youngsen’s Meet Me at the Museum is a contemporary example of the epistolary novel.  And who can forget Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series?

Graphic Text Instructor Lydia Conklin (‘15-’18) suggests writing a letter to someone who made you angry or annoyed.  Perhaps recently, perhaps years ago. Let out all your feelings. Then write a letter back in that person's voice to you. Really embody how they might feel about the situation, and what response they might have to your grievances.

Play with your approach. Will your letters be heart-felt missives to God like Walker’s Celie? Or comic messages to an abstraction like Koch’s letters to ‘experience’ and ‘stammering’?  Might your letter embed a poem as part of the message, a strategy that Youngsen uses in her novel, or use collage as in Griffin and Sabine?

As always, save everything you write—there will be opportunities to revise, share and even write more, if you’d like.  Who knows, you might decide that your epistle is the first step toward a novel!