Don’t forget to write

I grew up with letters from home.

My dad’s letters rest in a stack, tri-folded, neatly typed and faded. His weekly prose narrated everything from current politics to dinner conversations while noting their symbiotic similarity. If I should call, he quickly passed the phone to mom. But more regular than church, I would receive a letter from Dad pecked from our 1932 Underwood’s signature typeface that dropped the serif on the n’s and opened the a’s, signed, “Don’t forget to write. Love, Dad.”

Now emails and text messages have replaced snail mail. People email laconic messages for every purpose under the sun, including jokes sent to coworkers sitting at the next desk. Rather than saving and tying in twine my pithy text messages, my children’s phones undoubtedly delete my pearls of wisdom when “memory full” blinks. They chide me not for thinking with old ink ribbons, but instead for punctuating in a text. Punctuation, I am told, is totally passé.

People used to write with more complexity than our daily Facebook postings and emails require. They wrote personal letters, journals and diaries. I especially lament the loss of letter writing. Letters are windows into the past and reveal beyond the facts into the truth of what really happened. They have a personal resonance that I can’t get from email and certainly not a text. Consider the unique difference between Dad closing with “write home soon” and me telling my daughter to “txt me ltr 2 nite.”

My mom’s bottom drawer is reserved for Dad’s letters home, dozens of letters all in chronological order. As she succumbs to the same cancer that killed Dad, the letters find their way out and are opened more and more. For that moment, she’s no longer so alone.

I also wrote my share of letters home. My handwriting gave away details I hadn’t meant to share with either my small, controlled print or my widely decorated cursive that my brother likened to the fins on a Cadillac. Some sang just like a Jackson Browne song, a letter home telling them just what they wanted to know. Others rambled on until the last line, scrunched into the margins, managed to share the real truth that I hadn’t even known until it escaped my pen.

The act of writing forces you to think, to study the subject. It makes you think as nothing else does. The act of writing creates new ideas that do not occur without the pen on paper, or the keystroke on screen. Even with the instant revision afforded people today, writing is thinking. It is like a boot camp for the brain. That is why we think writing is so hard.

This is also why public education’s quest that every child read at grade level is not enough. Reading is a gateway to facts, and writing is the gateway to ideas. Reading tells, but writing shows. It is the sum of all learning. I have a sign taped on my desk that sums up the power of writing: “If I can say it, I can read it. If I can read it, I can write it. If I can write it, I can do it.”

Our students need to be able to write. We should be certain that students are writing not just about what they know; they need to study a subject so well that they know what they write. And the best way to start this crusade is by writing ourselves. Imagine the possibilities; the new notions only conjured up through the process itself, the stories and truth we have to share. We could all start right now with a letter home. It’s the next best thing to being there.

Emily Forstner teaches language arts at Wasilla Middle School.