Last week, into my inbox, fluttered this WordPress blogpost on handwritten letters. I’m smitten by handwriting on notes and letters, on backs of postcards and scribbles by my grandmother, my cousins, and classmates from long ago still found in schoolbooks, and in these times there’s an intimacy about them that I fear will be lost to this generation. Perhaps old simcards, those tiny digital notebooks filled with secrets, will be the replacements – who knows? Do they gain a vanillin perfume with age?

Anyway, the post got me to thinking that, for almost 20 years I’d kept every letter that my school friends had written and secreted to me. I posted about these letters a couple of years ago, when the collaborative project Disinflection was in motion. I’m sad to say, these letters had to be jettisoned when I moved from Australia to Italy.

Disinflection came about after the end of an extended estrangement between my sister Emma and myself, due to a third party who delighted in wreaking emotional havoc. After that was put to rest, the idea for a year-long project was floated and proliferated between us and it aided in the tentative restructuring of what had been, in total effect, a 10 year absence from one another’s lives.
I love what came from our project and, needless to say, Disinflection has become lodged in my soul.

Reading back on the pages, in the last two years I’m intrigued by how things have changed. Not just the big, dramatic stuff but the little stuff – what was important to us in our lives at that time. The monotonies, the day-to-day frivolities. The need for change that was already afoot for both of us, whether we knew it or not. That’s what I miss about finding letters, I think.

Anyway – what better month to start, than December – and that’s just what we did. First edition came off the press December 2010. Hope you enjoy discovering it for the first time as much as I’ve loved leafing through it again.

Next post: January 2011 zine revisit.