{"id":357,"date":"2020-07-12T19:42:14","date_gmt":"2020-07-12T19:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/?p=357"},"modified":"2020-07-12T19:52:22","modified_gmt":"2020-07-12T19:52:22","slug":"357","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/2020\/07\/12\/357\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writer’s Craft, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

Letters<\/em><\/strong>
\u00a0
I was probably in eighth grade, or possibly ninth, when I began writing to my first \u201cpen pal\u201d.\u00a0 She lived in SoCal and I\u2019m thinking she, eventually, attended Berkeley.\u00a0 This texting on Facebook reminds me, a bit, of writing to a pen pal except, of course, texting is immediate gratification.
\u00a0
In years past, the act of composing a thoughtful and informative letter took great consideration.\u00a0 Then, one had to sit down and actually engage in the exercise of taking pen in hand and scratching across the paper – write the words you may, or may not, have written out (at the very least, you would have thought them out) as a \u2018sketch\u2019 of your letter. This is why letter writing was, at one time, considered a \u2018high art\u2019 \u2013 ie, think of Jefferson\u2019s mountains of letter correspondence and the facsimile (polygraph) machine he used to make himself copies, in order to keep track of what he said and to whom: his \u201cdrudging at the writing table\u201d.
\u00a0
OMG! \u2665 There were no little smiley faces (or acronyms) used in the hopes they might express with a symbol or abbreviation what our dear, sweet and precise vocabulary was meant to convey to another human \u2013 whether business correspondence or a sharing of the heart, a letter was meant to emote, to bring forth certain passions and emotions.\u00a0
\u00a0
Love letters were, decidedly, a completely other genre.\u00a0 Love letters often expressed either emotional thoughts one had for the receiver or the hopes, dreams, plans and sometimes incredibly emotional daydreams one might maintain for another\u2026.the stuff of novels and plays and poetry.\u00a0 This was intensely serious business: one misplaced word, one incorrect word, one word dispossessed of the \u2018clearest\u2019 meaning or implied emotion could sever a relationship in the fluttering of a butterfly\u2019s wing \u2013 just that fast, indeed, do emotional tsunamis wash over we humans, especially if reading a correspondence when the correspondent is not in front of us, so we might inquire about meaning or request explanation and etc.
\u00a0
People kept those labours of love, those dynamic hand-written jewels, as one might treasure photographs or some other visual of a Loved One.\u00a0 Indeed, it is still felt that many letters contain, at least part of not only the writer, but also the receiver, who, having read, sighed, wept, laughed, dreamed over the letter, would certainly be (literally) within the very weave of the paper and the ink used to write upon it.
\u00a0
Letters have been, throughout human history, one of thee most Golden Threads; binding us, tying us, wrapping us together to our tribe, our clan, our family, our friends, our centers: our Human Core \u2013 an electrical charge, which when we join together with those contributing to that larger charge, we find anything, and everything, is possible.\u00a0
\u00a0
Magic.\u00a0
\u00a0
Sometimes I think we\u2019ve almost lost it and the ability to remember, to understand what the word even means \u2013 to experience it, the way we always have done, until recently in our story \u2013 not our history or herstory\u2026just Our Story\u2026all of us\u2026can we bring the Magic back?\u00a0 Find it again?\u00a0 Or is it lost forever?\u00a0 Has it morphed into some new, more superficial shadow of the old?\u00a0\u00a0 What do you think?\u00a0
\u00a0
Don\u2019t stray too far\u2026…
I think I\u2019ll write you a letter.
\u00a0
By Barbara Helvey Hughes, \u00a92016
Love is the language spoken here.\u00a0 Don\u2019t go back to sleep.
\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Letters document our Loves, our Lives and our Liberty through the ages. We can’t get the same feel from bytes on a computer…they take so small an effort, they are hardly worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions\/366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}