“Handwritten Letters Sketches Drawings I” by Frida Kahlo, courtesy of Vancouver Fine Art Gallery.
Introduction
In my accordion folder, next to a tab of identification documents and another of printed photographs, I store handwritten letters from friends and family. Specifically, I have kept every letter received– whether in a flashy card or on a plain piece of lined paper– since the summer before I left home for university. I do this because I feel bad letting go of them, but also because they bring comfort to me. When I take out the letters and read the thoughts of people I know (or have known) crystallized into deeply personal messages, I better understand those people. A lot of the time, people are more comfortable writing something than they might be saying it in-person. In this post I will attempt to explain how my sentimentality around these letters is evoked through their materiality, and the thoughts of others contained in them are mediated by writing.
Letters and Materiality
Bill Brown opens his essay on materiality in Critical Terms for Media Studies by questioning the material difference between a thought and a thorn that’s stuck in your finger. The thorn is obviously made up of matter; it is atoms arranged in a way that shapes the thorn. It is the shape of the thorn colliding with the atoms in your finger that causes pain and draws your attention to the urgent material nature of the thorn. It can be argued that thoughts are also material if you choose to look at them as “the effect of synapses within a neural network”, Brown says (49). However, the debate as to whether or not thoughts are material represents the kind of question that is secondary to a discussion of materiality.
Describing the materiality of something is not an assessment of yes/no on its concreteness. As Brown put it, “When you admire the materiality of a sweater, you’re acknowledging something about its look and feel, not simply its existence as a physical object” (49). So materiality then is a qualitative assessment of something that’s based in the senses. In the case of the sweater, the sense of touch is evoked because of how a sweater makes contact with the body. The sense of sight is also involved, because the clothing we wear is often a signal of personal aesthetics and identity.
Now I’m going to tell you what I like about the materiality of birthday cards, best wishes cards, nice-to-have-gotten-to-know-you cards, and letters of admiration.
- Handwriting. I like that with my grandparents’ handwriting, I have to decipher their cursive almost like I’m reading in a second language. My roommate recently told me that he can not read in cursive, as he was never taught to do so in primary school. There’s something almost antique by now about handwriting which is produced in cursive by default. Reading cursive teaches me patience, and feels like a way of adjusting to a communication practice of my grandparents’ day– even if on the smallest of scales. It reminds me that when I send my grandpa a hasty text message with zero punctuation, he is the one who must adjust to my communication style. Empathy and critical thinking– both ways of looking at the bigger picture– are evoked in me through working to comprehend handwriting.
- Voice. Just as people’s writing reflects their inner thoughts and perceptions, the way they communicate in a letter often maps easily to their personality. When I re-read letters from my dad, the voice reading it in my head belongs to him. That a choice of words, tone, or even the content of a message could evoke someone’s speaking voice in the mind I find incredible. Some people are more formal when they write than they are in conversation. In that case, my imagination goes as far as to conjure an image of that person giving a speech that they wrote, in order to find their voice within the writing. Most of the time though, in the context of a hand-written card, someone close to you will write in a way that makes their voice ring clearly through the noise of form.
- Persistence. Through the collection of paper– an often ephemeral and disposable material– I feel as though I have trapped in time a series of intimate pieces that any one given letter-writer may never have expected to be a part of. This is the part of the practice of saving letters that is self-serving. The record which was assembled from one-to-one messages becomes an archive of many unrelated notes with one commonality; they are directed towards a single recipient. Is the point of my keeping these notes only for the sake of using them on a rainy day? Another benefit of letter-keeping is that the archive offers a timeline of my personal history, experiences, and milestones by evoking memory. Just as flipping through printed photos facilitates my recollection of events, situations, and time periods, the letters facilitate a process of looking back upon a former time. The notes were written in now-time– yet as I read them today they influence and re-assemble my memory, which mediates the past. The “concreteness” of letters from a bygone time feels paradoxical– almost like they are relics which have survived through time.
Writing as a Medium Today
Each of these aspects of a letter’s materiality can be connected to theoretical frameworks, from language and communication to time and space. However, since their overarching medium is writing, I’ll describe what hand-written letters mediate by extending Lydia Liu’s scholarship on “Writing” in Critical Terms for Media Studies.
When thinking about why we even call non-cursive handwriting “print”, I was introduced to the idea of Print English in Liu’s essay. With the invention of the printing press, the English alphabet was transformed from a 26 character system, to a 27 character system (the new character being a space). “Printed English is an ideographical alphabet with a definable statistical structure. As a post-phonetic system, it functions as a conceptual interface between natural language and machine language”, Liu explains (318). “The centrality of printed symbols for technology has something to do with the fact that, to use Friedrich A. Kittler’s words, ‘in contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces’” (320). I think there’s something really fascinating about how, if we call non-fluid “print” handwriting an effect of the printing press, people’s handwriting with each generation is coming to resemble (or following) the way that our technologies produce language.
In terms of both the “voice” found in handwritten letters and their persistence as a record through time, the following quote from Lydia Liu applies:
“In the age of informatics and computer technology, writing increasingly penetrates the biomechanics of human speech to the extent that sound, including speech, is now being turned into an artifact, a notable example being text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The colossal amount of written and printed record and electronic information stored in data banks, libraries, museums, archival centers, and global communication networks further indicates how much the technologies of writing and print have evolved to shape modern life and the future of humanity” (310).
The first sentence here seems to say that writing is by now such a dominant form of communication that there are tools for converting it back into a “vocalized” form. Of course, text-to-speech has a voice that is de-personalised because it is a machine which speaks through a complex algorithm. This idea can be expanded to include artificial intelligence, which produces extremely generalized writing, to the point that we get an uncanny feeling when a real person delivers an AI-generated speech. Needless to say, the specific way a person we know puts together a sentence– especially given the statistically infinite possibilities– creates the “sound” of their writing. This sensory quality (I’ll extrapolate from Liu) is increasingly the “artifact” in the writing.
Lastly, the sheer amount of communications records we have globally today is a critical infrastructure of daily life. There would be no way to do research, return a package, or quote an old text sent to your grandpa without the storage of data. However, with digitization, physical records are created less and less frequently. Many of the physical documents and artifacts stored within our institutions of record-keeping are only material because of their age. To collect writing done on paper is to maintain a kind of archive of interpersonal connections throughout one’s life. Even the letters from people who are not in my life any longer, or the letter I wrote to myself two years ago during Jumpstart are valuable to me. Their material aspects evoke the people who wrote them, making those people feel real. The letters mediate my knowing people, and their knowing me.
Works Cited
Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 49–63.
Liu, Lydia. “Writing.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 310–326.
Blog post written by Naomi Brown
Naomi, you did a great job analyzing the importance of your collection as an object that evokes love throughout time and space. It makes the two of us: I also keep letters and postcards (ironically, mine are written by my university friends and will go back home with me).
I think there is a great potential in the topic of materiality in terms of its opposition with digitization: how different your interaction with those letters would have been if you scanned it? This would keep the handwriting and voice of your loved ones, and, arguably, be more durable than tangible pieces of paper. There is a lot to be said about these cards’ aura in relation to this!
Once again, great job!
Thanks, Bara! I like what you’re saying about scanning the cards and how certain material aspects could still be the same– save perhaps durability/persistence. I wonder if you’re right that the concept of “aura” has something to do with why the physical cards are more evocative. But also– to scan a card in order to save the “sentiment” while getting rid of the paper divorces the message from its original form. Maybe the distance that kills the aura is photography, or maybe it is the loss of the paper.
This is such a sweet post Naomi!! :,) I really appreciated this blog as someone who also keeps all their handwritten letters! No matter how simple the messages are on the cards, I still keep them all. It had me thinking about the importance of physicality when it comes to personal messages. I think that actually being able to hold something that someone has written for you, to see their handwriting and indentation on the paper, created by a pen, shows the time and effort put into the message. When reading this, I was also reminded of a piece of advice a creative writing professor gave in my first year. He advised that we should start by writing our stories on paper, since it would help with our creativity. At first, it felt nonsensical since we would have to hand in a typed-out version anyway, but after trying it out, it started to make more sense. I think this kind of ties into your point about the importance of voice in writing. While we still use our “voice” when typing, handwriting can feel more personal and authentic due to not having technology between the writing and the person.
Hi Lucy– thanks for your comment! I totally agree that physically holding cards really makes for an embodied experience of reviewing them. I also like what you had to say about your creative writing class. I personally experience more connectivity between my brain and my hand holding a pen when I write than I do between my brain and touch typing onto a screen. Maybe people are not yet “digitally integrated” enough to see the mediums of the computer and the pen as equally non-disruptive to written expression.
I really enjoyed reading your post, how it bordered creative nonfiction and critical media theory. I thought it was creative that you took something as personal as the letters you’ve received and related it to materiality and writing. As an avid postcard sender/receiver, I definitely resonated with the idea of voice coming out of their words. There’s a different, more freeing, sense of autonomy in how someone crafts a message through handwriting that a text or email just doesn’t have. It goes to show the power of physical writing that still stands in such a digital, techy world. And in turn, the emotions elicited out of that feel stronger knowing the sender sat down and took time to write something for you.
Thanks, Victoria! So cool that you send postcards. I feel like those especially are meant to be a keepsake because of the photography/ art on one side. I really like how you use the word “autonomy” to describe a sender of handwritten letters; it reminds me of some of the discussions being had in our class around the concept of body and embodiment. Writing by hand is powerful!
I loved this post Naomi! As someone who also cherishes handwritten letters (I keep every single one in a gift box), I really appreciate when others view these special things with the same sentimental value. Physical media artifacts hold so much emotion and memory in comparison to digital formats. Yes, they may be less convenient, more time consuming, and maybe even costly, but oh they are SO worth it to keep, revisit, and relive the exact moment you first received them. I look forward to reading more of your work soon as I really love your writings style!
Thank you Kim Chi! I agree that physical media objects feel intimate and extra memorable. Reliving the moments associated with letters and notes is a peak sentimental experience– as well as a creative one.
Hi Naomi!
As someone who also cherishes handwritten letters, your post resonated with me in a profound and personal way, offering insights into the concept of materiality and why humans invest such care in certain objects. I especially loved the delicate way you described your fondness for letters; it was so personal and beautifully expressed that it inspired me to reflect on why I treasure my own letters and objects in relation to materiality.
To build on your third point, Persistence: something I like to do from time to time is collect the letters I’ve received over the years from my drawer, pinch and measure the thickness of the journal pages I’ve been keeping since my first year of university, and gather the loose-leaf notes from my high school binders, just to feel the weight and gradual decay of the papers in my hands. I think it’s beautiful that through handwriting, our thoughts can take up physical space outside of the constraints of our minds, become tangible objects that can be held, traded, and treasured.
Hi Helen– thank you! I love how you describe your practice of pinching and measuring all your paper artifacts that contain your own outputs and the markings of others. Stuff like that makes me so happy. Thoughts becoming tangible, tradeable, treasured objects is a great way to describe those material/tactile aspects of writing done on paper.
This post brought me to smile as it reminded me of all my letters, movie tickets and notes that I keep hidden away in a shoe box in my closet. From reading your words about the materiality of letters, from comparing them to my own keepsakes and how they evoke memories and meaning, creating a personal archive documenting my own life experiences. Pointing out the rise of technology, and how meaning is lost within digital writing, taking away from materiality, personal voice, which make up handwritten letters, making me appreciate my collection of paper memories even more.
Thank you for writing this, Naomi 🙂 It really resonated with me. I especially connected to what you said about persistence and how letters become archives of personal history. I actually have a whole box where I keep the messages written inside gift cards I’ve received from loved ones. They might seem small compared to full letters, but the handwriting, the voice behind the words, and the emotions tied to those moments make them feel just as enduring. Like you, I find that rereading them brings comfort and reassembles my memory of people and times in my life.
I also really liked how you tied handwriting to empathy and patience. It made me reflect on how these material traces hold a kind of presence that digital messages never quite achieve. Your post reminded me that these little artifacts of kindness are powerful because they endure..
I really like your post. It reminds me of an ordinary noon when I was in elementary school. The teacher asked me to go to the front desk to pick up my things, but I hadn’t received any mail at school in the past. When I received it, I found that it was a postcard sent to me by my best friend who went to Japan last month. I still remember the first sentence she wrote was “You must be surprised to receive a postcard from me.” In it, she told me about her experience in the royal court in ancient Japan, etc. I believe that if her words were not on the postcard, I would not remember it for so long. It is also because of her action that I will buy a postcard set and write down my own feelings on the first postcard every time I travel in the future. It is very memorable.
I really loved reading your reflection—it was intensely personal and theoretically dense. The way you bridged the affective value of handwriting letters with the concept of materiality made the intangible tangible and human. Your argument for handwriting as a practice of empathy resonated deeply with me. The idea that reading someone’s cursive becomes an exercise in empathy and patience, a mode of intergenerational translation, is just such a beautiful observation. It made me remember how writing can replicate not only communication but even relationships themselves. I also liked the way you approached Lydia Liu’s discussion of writing as technology. The way that “print” writing related to the influence of the printing press was of interest—it made me think about how even the most personal forms of writing are shaped by larger media systems. The text-to-speech and AI writing quotation was especially evocative. You captured that creepy feeling perfectly—the way computer “voices” lose the intimacy and personality that letter writing still possesses.
Your post made me appreciate just how the materiality of letters—the paper, the ink, the blemishes—anchors memory in a way that digital writing can never hope to. Your last sentence struck me as profoundly moving: that letter collecting is akin to preserving an archive of human relationship. It’s an appreciation that writing at its most material is what makes human beings stay present to us, even across time and space.
This is such a great post, Naomi. I, too, struggle to throw away anything of sentimental value, *especially* handwritten letters. It reminds me of how my friend and I in middle school would exchange notes since we sat on the same desk in the Science classroom. Despite having that class in different periods, it was always a treat to walk into class and see that she left a note for me!
I think the idea of letters and its materiality, with the way that it holds the soul and personality of the person that wrote it is such a fascinating way to look at it. It reminds me of the Umberto Eco film we watched and how he cherished books so much, as evident by his collection in his own personal library. It was especially when he said that “you can’t dog-ear, smear with your thumb, underline on digital books”, hence losing each copy of a book’s individuality and personality. It makes me wonder with the materiality of it all. Even if we decided to digitize it, we can’t see the way the paper of the letter stains and yellows as the oils on our hands seep into the material. It’s also really interesting when we think about how so much of what we know about history is thanks to letters exchanged between people! These are really important things to archive, I think.
Hi Naomi! I really enjoyed reading through your post. I completely agree with your point about voice and how it differs for every individual, and how the tone might be different in writng vs speaking face to face.
Your blog also makes me think about how you collect these memories might be dictated by the medium. We tend to think of texts as a permanent record as compared to paper. It’s easier to loose or damage pieces of paper. But because of how often we use texting, even the most meaningful messages might be lost in the depths of conversations. On the other hand, the quality of paper being delicate makes you preserve it with more care (in your accordion folder :D) whereas the apparent permanence of something digital, demands less care, and which leads to it being forgotten faster.
Hi Naomi！
I really loved this post! I totally relate to keeping handwritten letters—I still have some from friends that mean a lot to me. The way you described handwriting as something that carries a person’s “voice” was beautiful and so true. It really made me think about how personal and lasting handwritten messages feel compared to texts or emails. Such a thoughtful and nostalgic piece!