Collegiate Pen Pal Society Revives Art of Letter Writing

(July 28) -- The epistolary arts languish. Where writers once indulged in pages of detail-dripping prose, they now punch out their missives, marked by brevity and pith.

Both styles have merit, but the former is dying for lack of necessity. A group of college students, born as the American masses first swarmed onto the Internet, is staging a revival. They've challenged themselves to a summer of old-fashioned letter writing.

Denver high school buddies Maggie Cooper, a rising Yale junior, and Annabeth Carroll, a junior at Vassar, founded The Society for the Prevention of Empty Mailboxes after spotting a pen-pal service for preteens in the back of Girls' Life magazine.

"We started talking about, what if there were a similar program for college students?" Cooper told AOL News. So they founded one.

While the society's mission embraces an age-old mode of communication, its founders are children of their era and waged a 21st-century publicity campaign.

"We had a Facebook event, and people started inviting their friends in that viral Facebook way," Cooper said. "We got 272 people from all different schools."





The 272 new society members committed to waiting days, maybe even weeks, till the postal carrier delivered a letter. They vowed not to seek out their new pals via Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or cell phone. They wrote introductory letters confirming their ability to correspond in the prescribed mode.

Jordan Crook read about the society on a flier hanging in the bathroom of Vassar's library. Phil Ortiz found the group on Facebook. This summer, Crook and Ortiz are growing acquainted one letter at a time.

Ortiz will be a junior at the University of Colorado at Boulder this fall and is double-majoring in English literature and philosophy. His Vassar pen pal Crook, same year, is majoring in international studies.

They share a love of the written word, an output rate of a few pages, and a mild mistrust of the U.S. Postal Service.

Neither had full faith in the multi-handler route that takes the mail from one box to another. They did believe in the wire of networks carrying virtual messages, so they hopped online, just the once.

"My wide-open mailbox caused me to be concerned that my letter had been lost," Crook wrote to AOL News, admitting that she e-mailed Ortiz.

"I have a slight mistrust of the postal service and am somewhat anxious about the possibility of them losing one of my letters," Ortiz wrote. "That would throw off the whole process, you see. Otherwise we've had no outside contact."

Ortiz writes to Crook about funny things that have happened to him, movies he's seen and books he's reading. Crook talks about whatever strikes her fancy.

"From goals and plans, to favorite music and movies and books, to funny stories, or descriptive imagery of this and that. There are no boundaries," she said.

Society co-founder Carroll takes a scrapbooker's approach to her correspondences, exchanged with a pen pal from Tufts University.

"I like sending things that have come up in my life. Business cards. A glow-in-the-dark star," she said. "Maggie and I are also big fans of sealing wax, which is also a dying art."

For her, the society has been a gift.

"Letters ... seem like a little present ... because it's something tangible, and you get to unwrap it when you open your mailbox."

Though the society's summer campaign stops at season's end, the mission continues. Cooper and Carroll will match a new batch of pals for the fall semester, including current scriveners wanting to stay on the paper trail.

In the act of slow correspondence, a harried college student might just discover a quiet place.

"There is something to be said for slowing down -- for being sure the words you use are the right ones, for putting down things that matter personally to you ... and for waiting patiently to allow others to do the same for themselves," Crook said.

"I think letter-writing encourages that change of pace, and the corresponding change in mindset."