What qualifies Good Mail as "good", in my book, is the way it challenges my expectations. It might be content. It might be form.
Today, we say goodbye to our friends Matt, Sue, Katie, and Maggie. They are heading home for the school year and taking all the late night good times on the lake with them. I'm going to miss the Good Mail I've received from Maggie and Katie this summer.
These are two of my favorite surprise installations:
I decided that today's studio project would be a letter to one of my best friends. He lives over in Australia. I didn't have anything special to say, I just miss seeing him.
This week, I've been playing with book structures in the art studio, so I decided to work some of those ideas into mail. I used some envelopes I thrifted awhile back.
In each envelope, there was a random (but interesting) piece of paper. There were vintage postcards - this one from Kobe, Japan to a person here in NW Montana dated 1947.
Another vintage postcard of St. John's Cathedral in New York City notes that the sender sailed for Brazil that day, in 1949.
Other envelopes contained simple books, made with papers from my collage pile. This one is a one inch high modified accordion-fold book made with a cyanotype printed two years ago.
This one is just a photocopy of an aerial photo of commercial flower growing fields in California. An almost Rothko modified mini-accordion fold with belly band.
Another is an "instant book".
Folded flat, the inside looks like this:
The outside:
Dancers from American Ballet Theatre at the height of the company's success. A wordless narrative from this fat ballerina with the ruptured tendon.
I put my letter in the last envelope, shuffled them, and bound them together very simply. All of these techniques came from a great book I keep in my studio - Esther K. Smith's How to Make Books. Autographed copies are available here.
Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life. How amazing to think that a faraway friend is thinking of you, even when you are not aware that it is so.
I love finding a surprise envelope in the post. Especially one as fabulous as this one! See more good mail here.
I love the internet, obviously, but something has been lost for me in the frenzied conversion to e-everything. Anticipation. Surprise. The warm fuzzy feeling you get when you understand that someone far away is still thinking about you, with some measure of care.
Growing up I spent summers at my Dad's house, just outside of Philadelphia. I used to wait for the mailman to arrive, totally impatient for a letter from a friend back home in Illinois.
Now, I send "good mail", randomly, to friends. Some "get it" and some don't. Some send good mail in return. My friend D. is one of those people. It's not an envelope, it's collage - front and back.
On my blog-a-versary, I posted a collection of some of my favorite posts from the last two years. A favorite project [perpetually] on my worktable was published in the first Blueprint magazine.
It seemed so simple - make yourself a collection of cocktail rings using vintage buttons using either a soldering iron or a little E6000 glue. About $400 in vintage buttons and two years later, I still haven't made any rings. (The original post on Martha.com is gone, but you can print out the directions here.)
I was thrilled when I heard from a blog reader that she had tried the project and it had gone well. She thanked me for the idea and said it helped her, that she had been feeling "kind of dead" lately and wanted to send me a ring as a gift. This is that ring.
Pretty amazing! One of those blog moments that kind of makes you "verklempt." Now, blog reader Lori and I are CPF Forever and we talk every day on Twitter. Thank you Lori, for the really good mail!
I love to send mail by post. Letters are a relic, care packages an archaeological doorstep find. So you can imagine how happy I was to receive this box, all the way from Australia, from my friend J. I had sent him a couple of books a few months ago - two I had finished that I thought he might enjoy. In return, he sent a precious selection:
"I'm sending you this books as a kind of intro to Australian writing. It's hard to know where to start. Should one begin with a 19th century classic? Or with one of the feisty left wing women writers of the 1940s? Or the most recently acclaimed?
In the end, I settled for a Nobel Laureate and the novel of his which I like best: The Aunt's Story. Next comes David Malouf who may well be our next Nobel winner. I chose his very first novel, Johnno, because it is about my home town in the era in which we both grew up. In fact, when it first came out, a friend gave it to me saying simply "It's us." He was right. Finally, Peter Goldworthy's Maestro, which I just enjoy.
After I chose them I realised that they all in their different ways deal with the complex relationship that Australians have with Europe. More then, perhaps, than know. You may recognise some of that in certain generations of Americans.
Both the Brisbane and Darwin described are long gone. Darwin after a Hurricane in 1974. Now rebuilt. Brisbane in the hurricane of development so that is now like Dallas on a river. I hope you enjoy."
And this precious letter begins a new category, and a new week of posts on Good Mail. Stay tuned.