The Letters Project
In The Hands of Strangers
Imagine you are browsing through the library stacks, or sitting in a café, or maybe in a park or on the bus. You notice a letter. It says Open Me. Intrigued, you do. Inside is a letter from a complete stranger, sharing something from their life, and inviting you to write back. Will you? Do you?
Welcome to In A Stranger’s Hands: The Letters Project. Letters are left in random places. People read them, write back, a correspondance is born. Maybe even new friendships. The results, with permission, are curated and presented in staged readings. A participatory art project and performance. Think of it as part The Human Library, part Confessions Project, part A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, and partly just itself.
The Letters Project was conceived by Cora Eckart, Scott Florence and Haritha Popuri in 2017, and the Greater Sudbury Public Library signed on as a partner. The Ontario Arts Council provided a bit of seed money. And so we seeded, nearly 50 letters in various locations around town. We had a 15% return rate. Some we imagine got lost. Some were read, brought home, but despite good intentions, never responded to. Perhaps one got eaten. We held a public viewing of our process in April 2018.
Wordstock 2018 loved the presentation and asked us to revive it, so we did, and presented again in November 2018.
We are still writing letters, and leaving them for strangers to find, to open, to read, to respond. When the time is right, we will present again.
So, if you come across a letter, will you write a stranger?
MEDIA:
https://www.facebook.com/WordstockSudburyLitFest/videos/598881393862540/
“The act of writing itself is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour.”