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This writer has devoted herself to letter-writing in a world of texts and social media

Rachel Syme is the author of "Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers."
Rachel Syme, Penguin Random House
Rachel Syme is the author of "Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers."

Rachel Syme is a writer with a massive audience. She’s on staff at The New Yorker, where she often profiles cultural luminaries like Lena Dunham and, recently, “Severance” star Adam Scott.

But one of her favorite ways to write is much more personal. Syme is a devotee of the ancient art of “correspondence” — better known as letter-writing. And in a new book called “Syme’s Letter Writer,” she offers a practical guide to an increasingly impractical tradition. Syme joined The Show.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: Rachel, one of my favorite things about this book is the case that you make for letter writing. And the case that you make is kind of that there is no real case for it.

RACHEL SYME: Exactly. I’m not about to evangelize for it as a kind of communication that is vital or necessary in the modern world, which I think actually freed me up when working on this book, because if this is not something that is crucial to daily life or are needed anymore, it becomes something else that can be a form of sort of slow, mindful friendship building. It can be a catharsis. It can be a channel for understanding yourself and others. So there are so many things that letter writing can be.

DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you in the sense of vital as defined as necessary. There’s nothing vital. But there is so much vitality in the sense of like, life.

SYME: Yes. Though you are only writing to one person, your reader is maybe the most receptive reader you will ever have in your life when you write a letter. And you can almost guarantee, especially because it’s such a novel way of getting your point across these days.

DINGMAN: Absolutely. And I am so glad you brought up this phenomenon of there being an audience of one. That’s a phrase that you use throughout the book. And I was so — this is going to sound ridiculous — moved by that, because there is so much pressure in modern culture for what you make or what you write or what you put out into the world to be appealing to the masses and to be the kind of thing that generates traffic.

SYME: Oh yeah. I mean, that’s completely part of it. There is something so interesting about writing something that you know will be read. It’s not for nobody, but it is also only going to be read for one person who is most likely your friendliest reader, who wants to engage with you on this deep level — on the line level, on the word level, on the overall aesthetic level — and who you are writing to get a response back.

So there is an interchange and a constant, like it’s just a snowball of communion. And it’s like getting to know someone through letter writing is probably the slowest but also the most meaningful way you could get to know somebody. And the truth is letter writing, I realized how much more substantive my connections were feeling when I didn’t feel like my writing was needed to be palatable for the larger public, or felt like marketing, or felt like an extension of my “brand.” But that it was just me on the page where I met the work, and then the other person met me.

DINGMAN: One of the things that’s great about the book is that in addition to all of these practical guides, you also do all this lovely writing throughout it, where you tell the stories of your own engagement with doing this practice. And you tell this amazing story about developing a correspondence relationship with this woman who now is a regular guest at your home for Thanksgiving.

SYME: Amy. Yeah.

DIGMAN: But my favorite scene is the one where you talk about meeting her for the first time in person after exchanging all these letters back and forth. Can you give us a little sense of what that moment was like for you?

SYME: Yeah, I mean, I met her on the street in Brooklyn outside my apartment, because she was coming to stay with me for Thanksgiving. She lives in Chicago, where she’s a midwife. And I hugged her like I had known her for 20 years. And we had just been writing letters for two years at that point when she finally came, I think it was a year and a half or two years.

DINGMAN: There was something for me about that scene that it made me think about times in my life when I have met people that I know I share an interest with because of social media. So the example that comes to mind is tweeting about baseball games.

SYME: Sure.

DINGMAN: And I have had experiences of then going to games and meeting up with these folks that I exchanged tweets with all the time. And we have something to talk about for five minutes, and then we realize we don’t actually really know each other at all. And I had this sense with you and Amy that you almost didn’t need to talk when you exchanged the hug, because there was this realization of how deeply you knew each other because of the —

SYME: Oh my goodness, it did get really intense really fast with Amy. And so much of it was like, “Here’s my hopes and fears and dreams. Here’s what I’m here’s what I stay up late at night worrying about. Here’s my stuff about my childhood. Here’s stuff about her childhood.”

I think that the wonderful thing about letter writing is that it kind of preserves the part of you that’s always 13 years old and just wants to make a new friend and makes a friend at camp. It kind of has a summer camp feel to it. And so much as you kind of come with that purest part of yourself that just really wants to find a kindred spirit.

DINGMAN: I love this idea of it unlocking your inner 13-year-old. Yeah, I think of that time in my own life — which I imagine many people feel the same way — as a time when I felt constantly like, “I have so many feelings! And I want to talk about them!”

SYME: Exactly.Yeah.

DINGMAN: As an adult, honestly, I still feel that way. But it feels way more taboo or unwelcome, particularly in a place like social media. If you do that, the backlash can be swift and career threatening.

SYME: Oh, not only that. Also just with your friends. They can get sick of you. Like, I think that you have to see every day. I mean, if you’re just constantly like, “Uhh, I’m having this issue!” There is this kind of unwritten, unspoken code with letters where it’s kind of like anything you put in here goes into the vault. This is a bubble we’re both in.

We can both sort of talk about our teenager hopes and fears and preoccupations. And you will be met with the same kind of energy.

DINGMAN: You have this quote that you come back to at least a couple times in the book — and I apologize, I forget who said it. But the quote is, “A letter always finds its destination.”

SYME: It’s a Lacanian quote, Jacques Lacan. At that point, I think he’s talking about some sort of psychoanalytic concept. But the way that I understand that, to me is that intention kind of always finds its mark. Maybe it takes a few tries and a few lost letters along the way.

DINGMAN: Right. Even if the letter you wrote doesn’t reach the person it was intended for, you did find the practice of letter writing.

SYME: You found the practice of letter writing. You learned something about yourself. You did a creative act that maybe took up an afternoon that would have otherwise been spent bingeing Netflix. There’s so many things that you can get from this practice that are not about the actual physical sending and receiving of letters, though of course that’s a big part of it.

And I think there’s so few things that are so low stakes and so high reward than writing letters to me. So really, that was the whole point of this book was just like, I am enthusiastic about this thing, maybe you are too.

DINGMAN: Well, the book that came out of it is “Symes Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence,” and I’ve been speaking with Rachel Syme, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker by day and the author of the book. Rachel, thank you so much for this conversation.

SYME: Thank you so much. Thank you. And send me your address. I’ll write you a letter.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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