A Memory of Mail

Mail call used to be a big deal. As each day neared a certain hour, I would feel anticipation building—a physical sensation like an electrical charge in my abdomen and legs, which got stronger as the minutes ticked by. How much mail will I get today? If I heard the wing door open, I'd clamber down from my bunk and peer into the wing hoping dearly to see a guard with an load of papers, magazines, and envelopes in their arms.

This anticipation wasn't for mail, per se. Sentenced to life without parole at the age of twenty-two and never having felt so cut-off from everything I knew and loved, being forgotten terrified me. Mail, at least, was evidence of a lingering connection; people writing meant they remembered.

I used to get a lot of letters, sometimes seven or eight in a day. Cards came almost as often. There was no question: people cared. I subscribed to magazines, too, but didn't consider them "real" mail. If you paid for your mail, you were cheating. What mattered wasn't the stuff itself but the concepts and the sentiments behind the stuff.

One friend sent a letter from the road, written over a one-week period, on the backs of gas station receipts, concert flyers, and grocery store notices as she road-tripped through Canada. Someone else always made his own colorful stationery out of photocopied collages. Other friends created word art by writing their letters as spirals, mazes, word searches, and other ecstatic surges of mixed-media creativity.

As part of an anti-drug initiative, prisons around Missouri stopped allowing paper mail in 2022. I remember saying somewhere, years ago, that the Postal Service continues to exist solely thanks to Hallmark, distributors of coupon circulars, the elderly, and prisoners. Back then, I questioned the continued relevance of snail mail. Even though I adored the little works of art that used to reach me, I stand by that preference for efficiency. Not that it would matter if I didn't; the whole American penal system is becoming increasingly reliant on digital-age methods.

Today, I scarcely remember how it felt to wait on mail call. E-mail now reigns king in the dark realm of prison no less than it does in the wider world. I no longer need to wait for a guard to deliver letters to the wing. Mercifully, those hours of anticipation are a thing of the past. With just a couple of taps of my finger, at any time of day, I can check for new messages on my tablet. And just like anyone else, I get a little dopamine hit from seeing a friend's boldface name in my inbox, signifying a new message from them. It's cool, even if it's not the same. A high-res photo attachment is simply never going to have the same emotional resonance as a decent 5"×7" print in an envelope, and a friend's words onscreen won't weigh as much as they would on a piece of paper, even if they're typed there.

I'm not complaining or decrying the impersonality of digital communication. I love getting messages more quickly and more often than postal mail used to supply them. Sending out my writing in a conveniently editable format—just a copy-and-paste away from submission—is also a bonus. All I'm saying is that having to rely exclusively on e-mail for my nonverbal communication feels as fundamentally different as flying feels from sailing. Each has its own drawbacks and perks.

My correspondence has been airborne for a couple of years. It feels absolutely normal now. Weird how easily we habituate, how quickly the past, however emotionally resonant, can be set aside. And yes, this is the sort of thought that surprises my mind when I'm gathering myself together in the quiet, dark, early morning.

Two Books I Spent My Fall Reading

In the month of November, my book club chose to read The Plague, by Albert Camus, a book I last encountered seventeen or more years ago, in the 1948 translation. This new iteration, translated by Laura Marris in 2021, felt, for lack of a better word, punchier. Its language seems better suited to the philosophy that Camus espoused, downplaying some of the melodrama of that earlier version. The discussions we had in our meetings this season—about freedom, loneliness, religious belief, human nature, germ theory, bureaucratic inaction, the patron saint of wrongful convictions, Flannery O'Connor's opinion of Jesuits, and quite a few other scattershot topics—lent themselves to some very engaging Wednesday mornings.

Unstructured leisure time is at a premium in my life. The reading I get to do is split in several different ways. The New York Review of Books brings me joy, even though I take weeks to read a single issue and skip many of the political articles. The books waiting for my attention seem to increase in number weekly. (I've come to think of my to-read list as aspirational at best; I have e-book versions of several tempting texts and zero idea of when I might start any of them.) When I do get to pick out leisure reading, it's a special treat.

Recommended by a small host of writers whose opinions I trust, Anna Kavan's Ice proved to be an unsettling little novel. I bought Penguin's fiftieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by the writer Jonathan Lethem, and was floored. Kavan's hypnotic storytelling kept me rapt, chapter after chapter, as her horrific tale unfolded like a fever dream.

The book centers around one man's obsessive chase of a young woman—not motivated by love or even lust, but by an odious desire to possess. His quest leads him around a war-ravaged world on the brink of ecological disaster. Is it science fiction? Yes and no. The story takes place on earth, in a time very close to ours, but under the perpetual threat of "the ice," huge freezing shapes that will soon engulf and smother all life.

Despite the high concept at play, Ice is decidedly "soft" sci-fi, verging on Surrealism. Kavan gives us a phantasmal tale that doubles back on itself, revising as it goes, like a nightmare or a bad trip or a spell of amnesia. You think it's headed one way, until it picks up at another point, ignoring everything you just read. The girl dies, then she's alive again. Then something else is undone and done again, in a different way. Events aren't undone so much as un-done. Further confusing matters, the narrator's protean account continually shifts perspective. He describes impossible-to-know events and changes identities at the blink of an eye. The whole time, you hate him, but he gives you a window into this story that you can't help but stare through, mute and aghast. What a book!

In the months to come, I'll probably pick through a textbook, devour some Gothic horror, and ingest some philosophy—if I can make time amid my various commitments. Where there's a will, there's a way.