Lisa Jane is a writer, photographer, actress and editor. Her fiction, journalism and photography has appeared in periodicals ranging from Bomb to MOJO to The Los Angeles Times. She made her screen debut in 1978 playing Robert Duvall’s daughter in The Great Santini, and has appeared in such films as When Harry Met Sally, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married and The Big Easy.

A member of the CBGB’s scene, Lisa was also a founding writer/photographer of the New York Rocker and the subject of the Blondie song, “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence Dear.” Many of her extraordinary photographs of this period and others can be seen at www.lisajaneperskyphoto.com.

Currently, Lisa is Editor at Large and Art Director for The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can follow her on Twitter @lisajanepersky.

For more information on Letters in the Mail, click here.

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Photo by Mark Hanauer.

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Three years ago Marianne Houghton was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Once an avid traveler, her deteriorating health has left her without an outlet for her wanderlust.

In response, her daughter has started the “I Wish You Were Here Project,” a website dedicated to collecting postcards addressed to Marianne from around the world.

If you want to send Marianne a postcard, go here.

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But even if Manhattan did somehow quell the gnawing inside of me, it also presented its own parameters of angst. The guilt I felt upon abandoning the girl my mother had known – going from a sweet college freshman to becoming another tattooed Lower East Side twenty-something with an alcoholic boyfriend – made it hard for me to breathe on the nights I couldn’t fall asleep.

I poured all of this out in long letters that I dropped regularly into a rusted mailbox on Avenue A. The letters were addressed to my friend Julie who was living her own mixed-up version of post-high school life in Oregon. Julie and I had gone to high school together, but had only become close in the summer after we’d graduated, running into each other repeatedly as we smoked cigarettes on the balconies of depressing apartments belonging to groups of boys who were trying to start bands on the East side of Atlanta. We blew plumes of smoke up into the warm night air, both of us grateful to be leaving all of this behind for college in the fall.

We were sorry to say goodbye at the end of that summer, wistful that we’d never been closer in high school when we’d had the chance. To make up for it, we wrote copious letters back and forth – Julie penning them from the University of Georgia and me from Vermont. Maybe because we didn’t know each other all that well we felt free to say things we wouldn’t have otherwise. Two years later I was in New York and she was in Oregon, both of us needing something more than our original destinations offered.

We talked on the phone now and then, and we even sent the occasional email, but without fail, we wrote each other a letter a week. In them we poured out all the things we were afraid to say aloud: the kaleidoscope of dreams we had, the aching fear that life wouldn’t be as big as we wanted it to be, the hope and promise we clung to in the reflection we’d found in each other’s words. I’ll never forget the little metal mailbox in the bottom of my building on East 5th Street, if only because it was the place where my heart sang a little every time I saw an envelope there, Julie’s curly handwriting looping across the front.

At my restaurant job I often worked double shifts that first year, trying desperately to keep up with my East Village rent, but on the breaks in between I sat in the park, smoking cigarettes and writing to Julie about my latest fight with my boyfriend, my writing classes at the New School and the lake of grief inside of me so wide that it threatened to swallow me whole. Julie’s letters back were fraught with confusion about her own boyfriend, her struggles to be the daughter her parents wanted her to be, and also tiny bits of poetry and lines so singularly tragic that I almost wanted to cut them from the page.

I never imagined the letters would come to an end.

One night a couple of years into living in New York, I came home from a movie with my boyfriend to the sound of the phone ringing. We could hear it before we’d even opened the door to the apartment. It was January and a deep cold had settled over the city. Just two days earlier I’d received a wonderfully fat letter from Julie detailing a trip to India she’d just returned from for a cousin’s wedding, so I was surprised to hear her voice on the other end of the line.

There was no easing into what she had to tell me; she just said it. “Claire, I’m in the hospital and I have leukemia.” She’d fallen the previous day at her internship and been taken to the hospital where she’d quickly been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.

Over the next year before she died, the little metal mailbox in the bottom of my building went back to housing mostly bills and circulars. I stopped checking it every day, knowing that only heartbreak waited there for me. I continued to write to Julie, of course, scrawling her hospital room number beneath her name on the envelopes, and a few days before she died I held her hand and promised that even after she was gone, I would continue to write to her.

It was a promise I didn’t keep.

After she was gone the mail became a flat thing. Email had taken over by then anyway, and for a long, long time I forgot about letters. In fact, I forgot about letters until a few weeks ago, when I wrote one out to all of you. Before I began that letter I thought for days about what I would write. I knew it would be different than the lengthy and sometimes passionate emails I’ve sent over the last decade, but only when I thought of Julie did I know how to start.

It was only after I thought back to those lonely days in the East Village that I remembered what it is that’s so different about letters. There’s something ragged and breathless about them. The very physicality of a letter, the fact that it was, at one time, held by the person who sent it, that it traveled across all the distance you yourself wish you could eclipse, can fill you up in a way that an emboldened email in your inbox never will.

There are secrets you can tell in a letter that will never be lost to cyberspace. Even if those same secrets have found a permanent home on the page you wrote them on, there’s something more precarious about hitting a send button when you fling them out into the world, than there is dropping them into a rusted blue box on the street corner.

I just want to say thank you for allowing me to remember this. I want to thank you for writing back to me, for sending me little bits of yourselves, and for making the sound of the mail coming through the door one that that makes my heart pound again.

I wrote back to all of you.

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“The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field.”

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In short, letter writing is becoming a dying art. Blogger Shaun Usher intends to preserve as many beautiful remnants of this fading form as he can, and publish them on an elegant blog called Letters of Note. Simply put, Letters of Note publishes “Scans/Photos where possible. Fakes sneered at. Updated every weekday.”

Usher has managed to obtain hundreds of written messages from literary celebrities, famous musicians, soldiers, political figures, and ordinary people and published original scans as well as meticulous transcripts (so we can read illegible handwriting) on his website. This epistolary ensemble is not to be missed, and the collection includes plenty of humor mixed in with heartache.

An entry from March 24^th includes a copy of Jack Kerouac’s letter to Lucien Carr and his wife Francesca after Kerouac spent a couple of harrowing days with the poet William Burroughs in Tangier. “Feel great but Burroughs has gone insane,” writes Kerouac. “I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles…I’ll be glad when Allen gets here.” Kerouac was, of course, referring to none other than his friend Allen Ginsberg, who was to join him a few days later, a fact we understand only because Usher curates his entries with useful contextual information and an explanation of his sources. In this case, he found the letter within Columbia University’s online exhibition “Naked Lunch: The first fifty years.

Another letter, scrawled in the unsteady hand of a young child, comes from a boy who benefited from Frederick Banting’s discovery of insulin in the early 20^th century. The boy, Teddy Ryder, suffered from diabetes and wrote to Banting to thank him for his discovery. “I wish you could come see me,” writes Ryder. “I am a fat boy now and I feel fine.”

The list of compelling letters goes on: an account of Aldous Huxley’s death by a man who was administering him LSD during his last days, a note from a humble Elvis Presley while he was stationed as a soldier abroad, a desperate note from engineer Nikola Tesla as he unearths signals from life on other planets, and an “absolutely filthy” memo from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut creator Matt Stone to the MPAA about alterations of particularly lewd content. In his postscript, Stone writes: “This is my favorite memo ever.”

Usher’s project exposes us to an inner world of the personalities that make up history. The letters illuminate these writers’ candid concerns, unfiltered ideas, and vulnerabilities, and also make clear how important it is to save and preserve the fragile written form.  Usher tries to infuse his website with varied people and topics, and many of the letters come from readers who submit noteworthy content. To find out more about Usher and his project, read an interview of him on True/Slant.

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I just learned from the Guardian UK about the new complete, annotated, illustrated edition of Vincent Van Gogh’s Letters, an event they assert that is “one of the major publishing achievements of our time.”

But luckily for many of us that can’t afford the book, there is a website that documents the complete letters as well.

And if you want some good visual background on the letters, most of which were written to his brother Theo, I recommend watching Robert Altman’s Vincent And Theo, featuring the incomparable Tim Roth as Van Gogh.

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