Notes from a Novel Hermit: Letters and Lifelines

A long time ago, there were letters.

After my day at high school was over, and dinner and (usually) homework was finished, I sat at my desk and I wrote. For five years, I wrote every week, and often every day. I didn’t know then that what I was doing was an act of creation. I was just compelled to write to my friend. I wrote letter upon letter to the Original Z, and Z wrote back. Or maybe it was the other way around: she wrote, and I answered.

To me, the letters were a lifeline. Yes, Z and I saw each other every day at school, but because I only lived a few blocks from the school, and Z, like most of the students (and all of my friends) came in from the surrounding area, our time together was limited. And I wanted no limits! Z and I also talked on the phone, but phones then were one line into the family home, and there were always others who might need to make a call, or who might overhear. The letters were private expressions. They allowed me to sink into the things, to dig through my thoughts and feelings and try to find words so that Z might understand. I was a girl who wanted community, in a house of people who found their comfort in being insular, and home often felt confining. Claustrophobic. The letters let me reach beyond the walls, to beam myself out into the world.

For years, that era stood as my most sustained period of daily writing. But when the friendship fell off, my writing went too. Z and I grew distant through our time at university, and eventually we drifted apart completely (only to reconnect—by letter—more than twenty years later). Maybe it was because I was out on my own, with fewer restrictions on my personal connections, living an independent life, or maybe it was just that I didn’t have Z at the other end, but for years, I hardly wrote deeply at all. Even when my work required writing, I was using my skill, without call on my heart and soul. And, for better or worse, it was my heart and soul that I needed to tell myself to Z.

It’s thirty-seven years since I wrote my first letter to Z. And, since March, when we all grew distant, I’ve found myself writing letters again. I write to Long Lost, who has made a pandemic project of sending letters to dozens upon dozens of friends and fellow writers. The letters from Long Lost come so frequently, that I’m always behind in my responses, but I love to see the envelopes in my mailbox, with their inventive forms of address, strengthening a connection that was always there, but might never have been found. I write to my Fairy Godsister. As early as last summer, she and I have been mailing each other bits of our writing to read, both of us eager for contact and encouragement, but also to be away from our computer screens, with their constant taint of work. And then there are letters to As-Yet-Unsinkable on one coast and Kahoots on the other, friendships created entirely through correspondence, forged as resistance against this otherwise isolating time.

It’s taken me months to realize that what’s happening now, is not so different than what happened when Z and I were writing. Circumstances have confined me, and letters have become my way to travel. Through my letters, I’m exploring my own existence, and also declaring it—I’m here, I’m still here! Then I listen for a response: the affirmation that others too, are persistent and surviving. We’re writing ourselves out into the world.

Would I ever have started writing, without Z to read me? Without Z, how would I have gone on? When I no longer had her, it took me years to come back to writing, and to this true and vital part of myself. I owe so much to her, my first and faithful reader.

My current correspondents propel me to write, too. Not only letters, but also on my novel. In my correspondents, I have the company of fellow writers, whose struggles with their own work parallel mine, and who reveal how the isolation both depletes us, and enables the space to make our stories. They provide consolation and inspiration, reminding me that—if I can just keep going—eventually my novel will find readers, too.

Thank you, thank you, my Long Lost. My Fairy Godsister. My As-Yet-Unsinkable. My Kahoots. And always and forever to my Original Z.

I promise, a letter is coming soon.