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Hollister resident Heatherly Takeuchi is in search of another person named “Heatherly.” On Aug. 2, at the inaugural Sunday Letter Project hosted by Hill’s Bookstore, she wrote a letter that will be viewed by total strangers in Scotland in hopes of finding one.
“Heatherly is a Scottish last name,” Takeuchi said. “My mother decided to give it to me as a first name. And I thought I might meet someone who knows a Heatherly out there.”
It’s an inspiring start to her journey with the project, a worldwide network of more than 14,000 pen pals who have pledged to write at least one letter a week.
Participation in the project begins with writing at least one introductory letter that is sent to a networked store or stores of the participants’ choosing.
Takeuchi chose to reach out to customers of the family-owned department store Quince & Cook in Perth, Scotland.
The letters are posted at that destination, where a customer there can take a photo of it, write a response, and mail it to a sponsoring store, in this case, Hill’s Bookstore, which recently joined as one of the project’s “Letter Keepers.”
“You send your letter to one of the stores on the list,” Hill’s co-owner Adam Hill said. “Your introduction letter lives at that bookstore. The customer doesn’t take it home; they just take a picture of it. So your letter can generate multiple responses in return.”
Participants use their sponsoring store as a return address to maintain their privacy. When a response is received, that store alerts them to pick it up so they can write back in a timely fashion.
“This project is a perfect antidote to our generation’s dependence on technology,” Hill said. “It allows you to slip back into a time when the world felt less frantic and more spacious.”
Founded last year by Rebecca McMillan, owner of Wildflower Illustration Co in Gloucestershire, England, she got the idea from her customers when, after she had set up a display of stationery on an antique desk, she heard several remarks on the loss of letter writing as a practice.
“The phrase that we kept hearing people say was some version of ‘It’s such a shame that no one writes letters anymore,’” she said. “Some would tell stories about boxes of letters that they’ve gotten from their grandparents.”
McMillian and her husband, Karl Maguire, began the project privately, writing letters to family and friends. They started printing Sunday Letter Project stationery and left it around the shop to arouse curiosity and gauge interest. Within two weeks, 1,000 people had registered and joined.
“I think people were feeling so fried by the state of the digital world that it obviously caught something that people were really craving even if they hadn’t necessarily realized that they were craving it,” she said.”
According to Hill, the project has a few simple rules.
- For safety reasons, letter writing is restricted to those over 18 years old.
- Letters must be handwritten and use Hill’s Bookstore as the return address.
- No identifiers such as addresses, phone numbers or social media handles are allowed.
- The tone and content of the letters must remain “kind and respectful.”
- No sales, promotions, or self-advertising of any kind are allowed.
The commitment, according to McMillian, is for at least one letter penned a week, with the expectation of eventual responses to follow, which could be a welcome change from a constant influx of emails, text messages and, heaven help us, viral videos.
In her letter, Takeuchi said she mentioned her work as a math tutor, her ownership of two rabbits and her interest in both fiction and nonfiction. Currently she’s reading “All the Colors of the Dark” by Chris Whitaker and Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential.”
She said she has not had a pen pal since she was a child but regularly sends notes of encouragement to friends and family. She said the idea of personally hand-writing letters for the project is very appealing.
“It is a little more old school, and it shows a bit more care is taken in the writing,” she said. “It puts you in a different frame of mind instead of just dashing it off as a text or email and using all those emojis and abbreviations. It says, ‘Hey, I am thinking about you.’”
By bringing the bookstore into the project, Hill said, local participants may also receive introductory letters from others in the network, which will be displayed for his customers to read and respond to, if they wish—keeping the project growing and thriving.
For Hill, that kind of interaction can be an almost meditative relief that he thinks people will come to appreciate if they keep up with their correspondence.
“The faster and more instant things get,” Hill said, “the less valuable they become. Having to wait for a letter to be received from the recipient and then writing back is more rewarding in so many aspects. And how great does it feel to receive a handwritten letter in the mail?”
For more information about The Sunday Letter Project, stop by or contact Hill’s Bookstore by email or phone at 831-294-3126. Or, better yet, send the store a letter at:
Adam Hill
c/o Hills Bookstore
650 San Benito Street, Ste 140, Hollister, CA 95023
Hill’s next Sunday Letter Project gathering, with stationery and envelopes provided, is set for Sept. 6 at 5 p.m.
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