Raw Sugar last night was pretty empty when I walked in - a couple of people in the little back room, and a few scattered at the tables. But then, I was early.
As I pulled my hat off, though, Free Will, sitting at a back table with his fiancee and a scatter of notepaper and postcards, recognized me and got up to give me a hug. I grabbed a table near theirs and sat down to talk for a while, about poetry and farming and Steve Sauve. And while we were talking, another friend of mine arrived and took a chair, and I went to go pay up and get my stationery. The idea was that you paid $5. That got you a cup of coffee or tea and a couple of sheets of paper, an envelope, and a local stamp. And a pen if you needed one. And a little sheet of paper with some ideas on what or who to write and why letters matter.
As I was settling in, Sean Zio arrived, along with a couple more friends, and our table was complete. Eventually, after a little more talking, we got started on our letters, and then the night became an interesting alternation between talking to each other, and falling into a few minutes of silence when we were all writing at once - or drawing sketches, or doodling on the envelopes. Later in the evening, Luna Allison (fresh from her cover shot on Capital Xtra) and Montreal poet Sherwin Tjia showed up, with invitations to the Slowdance Night at Shanghai on February 13th.
I used to write more letters. I used to draw my own stationery and write multi-page letters. I fell out of practice. Email has had a big part in that - when everyone in my family knows what I'm up to on a day-by-day basis, it's hard to think of what to say in a letter that they won't already know by the time they get it. I think the trick is to relearn the artistic letter. A letter isn't about conveying information anymore, it's about an experience, something physical you can pick up and hold, and that forces us to get over feeling like communication is the only reason for language between friends or family. If you can make a phone call without needing to convey a point, we decided at our table, why do we feel there needs to be a point to a letter?
So I tried not to worry about whether the letter I was writing was high art, or whether it had anything meaningful to say, and tried to remember that the meaning, mostly, was the act of writing and mailing it.
And by the end of the night, I had written a letter to someone I don't think I had written to in years, which really just tried to give a sense of where I was physically and mentally while I was writing it, and I went home wanting to continue writing, by hand, in ink, on paper, just to be writing.
