When Annie Syed appeared on the other side of my screen, courtesy of the revered, overused, and somewhat dreaded magic of the infamous Zoom call, it only took a wave, a breath, and an observation, before our conversation began. Unsurprisingly, it was about words.
Letter by Annie Q. Syed
Dear Anne,
It’s very green outside today and not quite as hot as it will be in a few days. Spring in New Mexico is like riding on a bucking bull: it’s over before you know it.
‘Writing is a lens more than a thing you do,’ Nay Saysourinho says, through a video screen. We are sitting behind our screens in England and Greece as she talks to us from her house on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut.
Letter by Nay Saysourhino
Hi Ellen,
Thank you for giving me two more extensions on the essay. I am sorry I have not been in touch since, but I am trying hard to finish the work, and it is my hope that I will be able to send the completed edits by tomorrow morning. It is, I must stress, a hope.
Letter by Nancy Campbell
Dear Sigrún—
I should be with you in Reykjavík, where tonight there’s an opening party for an exhibition at the National Library of Iceland. What an irony that JAÐARLÖND (“Borderlands”) is about cross-border communication. Instead I’m locked down in Oxford.
Letter by Julia Zarankin
Dear Universe,
You’ve been wondering about my life, about my routine, about how I’ve been spending my days. You mentioned Annie Dillard’s famous words, ‘how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,’ and it makes me shudder. These days have yielded so very little and so very much.
Letter by Rachael Smart
Dear Jon,
I’m writing from my temporary office at the ping-pong table. In these strange capsules we call days, a ping-pong table isn’t as redundant as it might sound for a work base. When the death tolls spike and the gravity of other people’s loss presses at my chest, so that it’s difficult to speak during video calls, I find the blueliness of the table brackish and soothing.
Letter by Aislinn Hunter
Hey You,
How goes your self-isolation? Is it bad where you are?
Sometimes now, when I walk on the trails near my home and meet another hiker, one or the other of us will back into a trough of fern to awkwardly pretend social distancing is normal, and I’ll ask ‘So how’s your pandemic going?’
Letter by Jody Kennedy
Dear Billy,
I think you’d probably like the South of France in spring when everything is still fresh and new (the almond trees are the first to bloom), before the summer heat (especially in late afternoon) brings the cicada’s incessant poo-tee-weet (about mid-June), dries the grass to brittle stalk, turns the lavender fields a deep violet, and makes the Mediterranean Sea warm enough to finally comfortably swim in.
Letter by Haisu Huang
Dear Comrade Ma and Ba,
Last time I wrote you I eloped to America to marry my wife. You replied with silence. I thought we’d talk about it when I visited you in the summer.
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