Post Me Do and Keep Me Posted with Bidisha
I have an illicit love affair to confess. It isn’t fashionable, but the romance and nostalgia of it seduces me every time. Sometimes my love for snail mail feels like a dirty little secret; a vice only indulged in alone in the dead of night when no-one else is watching. But no longer do I need to feel grubby and tainted every time select a new sheet of paper from my beloved stationery box and set to work with fountain pen, stamps and address book (and usually glitter, stickers, pritt-stick, a collage of magazine cut-outs and an assortment of other bits and bobs that take me back to my fanzine and pen pal days. Old habits die hard, even when you’re trying to sound sophisticated…)
You see, as part of the Freeword Flow Festival, writer and broadcaster Bidisha and Phillip Cowell will be leading a letter-writing workshop called Post Me Do, taking place next Friday 1st October in The Sassoon Beer Room of the Free Word Centre in Farringdon. With George Bernard Shaw once famously claiming that “the perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post,” the participatory session aims to explore the lost art of letter writing and encourage reconnection with it.
Later that evening, it’s Keep Me Posted in the Free Word Centre’s Lecture Theatre, a letter-writing club night at which Bidisha, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Jean Sprackland, Elaine Feinstein, Helen Chadwick and Two Women On The Edge Of A Nervous Postcard will read from a selection of personal, literary, recent and historical letters.
And even if after all that a letter still seems like it’ll take too much time, you could always scale down your love letter to handy A5 format and get involved in the Ladyfest Ten Postcard Project instead.
Post by Jane Bradley
(Image by Sherman Yang, via his Flickr photostream)
I’ve just been writing about this, it’s a gorgeous idea.
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