Laura and Irene both speak of their personal relationship with letter writing. Laura is apt to send letters to whoever on her Facebook friends list wants one, while Irene sends long digital letters in the form of emails to a friend in New York. In a beautiful analogy, Laura then compares letter writing to kintsugi.
In this day and age, writing morally calls for recognising that every sentence is written inside a burning house. To write anyway is not an act of purity but an act of responsibility. It is not putting out the fire, but bearing witness to its heat, its smoke, and the people trapped inside.
What began as an unsuspecting blog page, advertising itself as ‘the letters page for a journal that doesn’t yet exist‘, soon morphed into a professionally produced journal of which every page was a letters page.
The return to ‘shed season’ provides our latest contributor, Nicola Varley, with ‘that bit of space to think and drift off and daydream’, discovers the The Letter Page’s Maria Rocha, as she sits down with Nicola to discuss the creative process, her hopes for the future… and cat pictures.
When Harriet outlined the stepping stones of her early publishing career, she described its trajectory as ‘very much Letters Page, internship, assistant role’.
All Zoom meetings start with a slight pause as the microphone connects, and a relief when you can see each other on-screen and hear each other clearly. This was the only pause in my conversation with Harriet Dunlea, as we talked about university, The Letters Page and all things publishing.
Harriet worked as a student on The Letters Page in 2015, and is now Head of Books at Carver PR. She remembers learning about The Letters Page in a lecture and ‘feeling really, really happy when I got it because it was tangible experience that I get to do in Nottingham, where there aren’t that many opportunities to do publishing work experience.’
theletters.page 