Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason

to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day,

and that was mainly because my mother has never believed

in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general.

And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents,

I was literally waiting by the mailbox

to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone,

which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital,

but I was just looking for some sort of scribble,

some unkempt cursive from my mother.

And so when I moved to New York City after college

and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression,

I did the only thing I could think of at the time.

I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me

for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city,

dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere,

in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere.

I blogged about those letters and the days

when they were necessary, and I posed

a kind of crazy promise to the Internet:

that if you asked me for a hand-written letter,

I would write you one, no questions asked.

Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak --

a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied

in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl

who barely even knew her own coffee order,

to write them a love letter and give them a reason

to wait by the mailbox.

Well, today I fuel a global organization

that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox,

fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media

like never before to write and mail strangers letters

when they need them most, but most of all,

fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate,

filled with the scriptings of ordinary people,

strangers writing letters to other strangers not because

they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee,

but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing.

But, you know, the thing that always gets me

about these letters is that most of them have been written

by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.

They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters.

They're the ones from my generation,

the ones of us that have grown up into a world

where everything is paperless, and where some

of our best conversations have happened upon a screen.

We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook,

and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.

But what if it's not about efficiency this time?

I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate,

which is a conversation starter, let me tell you.

If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter)

And a man just stared at me, and he was like,

"Well, why don't you use the Internet?"

And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist,

nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller."

And so I could tell you about a woman

whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan,

and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation,

and so she tucks love letters throughout the house

as a way to say, "Come back to me.

Find me when you can."

Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters

around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find

her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out

onto the quad and finds love letters hanging

from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches.

Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life,

uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye

to friends and family.

Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters

just like this one tucked beneath his pillow,

scripted by strangers who were there for him when.

These are the kinds of stories that convinced me

that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair

and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now,

all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing,

the doodles in the margins.

The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down,

pull out a piece of paper and think about someone

the whole way through, with an intention that is so much

harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone

is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once,

that is an art form

that does not fall down to the Goliath of "get faster,"

no matter how many social networks we might join.

We still clutch close these letters to our chest,

to the words that speak louder than loud,

when we turn pages into palettes to say the things

that we have needed to say,

the words that we have needed to write, to sisters

and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long.

Thank you. (Applause)

(Applause)