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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — In 1985, a 13-year-old girl in New Zealand spotted a pair of purple, lip-shaped sunglasses in “Young Miss” magazine. In March, I traveled 9,000 miles from New Hampshire to deliver them to her, finally fulfilling my pen pal’s decades-old request.
International Youth Service, the agency that matched us up 40 years ago, has long since folded, but other pen pal programs have survived — or even began during — the internet age. And even though New Zealand’s postal system has reduced home delivery days, Denmark has stopped delivering letters altogether and Canada is moving in that direction, some see signs of a letter-writing resurgence.
“The hunger is there,” said Rachel Syme, a writer for The New Yorker magazine who created a pen pal program during the COVID-19 pandemic and later published a book encouraging others to take up handwritten correspondence.
More than 15,000 people signed up for Syme’s Penpalooza project in 2020, and she still gets hundreds of takers when she coordinates a new round of matchmaking every few months. She also gets requests for pen pals at book signings for “Syme’s Letter Writer – A Guide to Modern Correspondence,” and the stationery stores she frequents in New York City are always crowded with customers.
“People are very interested in physical, analog things right now,” she said. “I think it really has an appeal especially to a younger generation who grew up with a phone glued to their hand, to do something that’s more tactile, slower, more intentional, more mindful, but also just disconnected from the internet in every way.”
AP AUDIO: Dear Readers: Yes, pen pal programs still exist in a digital world AP’s Lisa Dwyer reports on a comeback for an old tradition, pen pals.
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