Maggie L. Cooper and Annabeth Carroll were thumbing through a Girls’ Life magazine this spring when something caught their attention: an advertisement for a pen-pal club for preteen girls.
The women had been friends since high school, when they had exchanged funny postcards. But now they were college sophomores, too old to correspond with preteens, yet eager to write letters.
So they decided to create their own club: the Society for the Prevention of Empty Mailboxes.
They built a Web site, started a Facebook group, and posted fliers in their libraries at Vassar College and Yale University. What had begun as a two-person project soon became a national phenomenon.
Within weeks, hundreds of students across the country had joined the society online, and 272 students from 55 colleges had mailed in letters introducing themselves to the group and their future pen pals.
The two women read each and every one and played matchmaker. Fans of obscure film directors were paired up, as were music buffs and people who clearly valued writing—such as the author of a full-page limerick.
Jeremiah M. Moon was among those who responded. His favorite recent album, he wrote to a pen pal yet unknown, is the National’s High Violet, his favorite concerto is Dvorak’s in B minor, and he enjoyed Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore the other day. But he is no hipster, Mr. Moon added.
Ms. Cooper was surprised and thrilled by the volume of letters. “I love the idea of people writing letters that wouldn’t have been sent or written otherwise,” she says. “Sometimes you need a nudge, and having a pen pal is a motivation to write.”
Shelby E. Cauley is one of the society’s most enthusiastic members and most successful advocates. A rising sophomore at the University of Puget Sound, she recruited 31 classmates to the cause. Because she had lived in many states and countries as a child, Ms. Cauley had long enjoyed writing and receiving letters from faraway friends.
“I knew how nice it was to receive something other than junk mail and bills in your mailbox,” she explains. A pen-pal service, Ms. Cauley says, is particularly appropriate for college students: “We’re all at a certain time in our life when we are figuring out who we are and what we want to do. It’s a time of self-discovery, and it’s nice to share that with someone else.”
Ms. Carroll agrees that having a pen pal can make college students feel more comfortable about the uncertainty in their lives. “Many people mentioned in their letters that they would be doing something they had never done before,” like working in an internship, she says, “and that it would be reassuring to them to know that they would be getting some piece of mail over the summer.”
Both Ms. Carroll and Ms. Cooper emphasize that letter-writing could lead to more meaningful and honest communication among students. As Ms. Carroll puts it, writing is more liberating than meeting someone face to face. “You can say a lot without feeling judged or getting some kind of negative reaction,” she says.
Ms. Cooper elaborates: “It’s like a person at a slumber party who won’t say what they really think until the lights are out. There’s a safety in writing to someone so far away.”
But the society is about more than simply making friends. Ms. Carroll says having a pen pal will help people preserve their college memories.
“College is so short,” she says. “At least we have letters.”