Letter writing is the inspiration for global OU literary event

When was the last time you received a handwritten communication that made you happy, a tangible connection with someone removed from you in space and perhaps time zone?

Sara Haslam was lucky enough to have that experience in Post Room 1 in Perry C recently. She was there to collect an unexpectedly large handful of handwritten – and in some cases handmade –  postcards sent to build community ahead of an Open University conference taking place on 5, 6, 7 November.

Sara is leading the programme team for Letters and Literature 1500-2025: Histories, Forms, Communities which is supported by OpenARC and MK Lit Fest among other partners. It is free, online, and open to all. More than 100 speakers from 15 countries are joining together to make this what promises to be an excellent event, featuring presentations on letters as plot devices and stylistic markers, on editing writers’ letters and what they reveal about professional networks and reputations, on the digital, museum and archive life of literary letters, and on how letters inspire creative acts and making. Colleagues from the Departments of English and Creative Writing, and Languages and Applied Linguistics collaborated on the call for papers, the idea generated at a Research Away Day in John Keats’ Hampstead home. 

Sara says ‘we were thrilled by the response to our call for papers. As the range of fascinating topics shows, we hit a live academic nerve. But the theme perhaps also speaks more widely to a cultural shift as communication technology moves ever more swiftly away from material forms.’ (In Norway, a Government-sponsored report released in December recommended an end to postal deliveries to people’s houses.) ‘In a fragmented world’, Sara says, ‘letters connect. Handwriting! On an object that has travelled actual distance from one hand and eye to another!’ As highlighted by some of the conference abstracts, the concept of a ‘gift exchange’ is among the more potent related phrases from scholarship.

Presentations, including 23 by postgraduate researchers, will engage with related ideas, and many more besides, as they situate the letter in literary, stylistic and creative histories from 1500 to the present day. If you love your Shakespeare, Austen, Elizabeth Bishop or Charlotte Brontë, or if you’re looking to learn more about letters, literature and politics, the journey from letters to poems, or love letters in Victorian fiction, and in Old Delhi, then there’s something here for you. Join us for a range of these presentations or come and listen to speakers from London’s Postal Museum, expert archivists, publishers, and guest authors in conversation with writers from the Open University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. 

Edward Hogan, member of the programme team, wrote to all speakers to invite them to send a postcard to us at Walton Hall – a material connection ahead of our digital encounters in November. The response, domestic and international, speaks well for itself, and we shared one image above.

Please join us to celebrate and explore the letter and literature in November. And if you can’t, you might send a postcard instead!