A Mail Club For Your Analog Era… one win and one fail
First, the win. I’m getting the hang of this new mail club: Cottage Letters Club.
The clover art print for this month’s Cottage Letter turned out nicely. It’s always nerve-wracking wondering what will arrive from the printer.
Is it new if I’ve been doing a mail club since 2012? Paris Letters was the original letter subscription, back when these things were not so trendy. Now in 2026, the analog life is catching on. There is even an article about mail clubs in Cosmopolitan. It’s nice to get fun mail.
One reader thinks I should continue the Paris theme on occasion. I might. Let me know.
Another asked if I would make stickers and bookmarks. Maybe. Let me know.
Someone else asked for a set of the art prints. Maybe. Let me know.
Someone else asked for the art prints to be made into a set of notecards. Maybe. Let me know.
Cottage Letters Club is a little bit of an old-lady-in-training name, but I like how the double Ts in Cottage match the double Ts in Letters. How letters look together? There can be poetry in that. How they sound together: Cottage Letters. Yep, that works.
The initial batch of letters included tree blossom stamps. So pretty!
Writing the letter itself is what I spend the most time on. Some of these mail clubs out there are really into ephemera. That’s fine. I like a fair bit of ephemera myself. In fact, I might have an ephemera problem. I’ve been lining my office with pretty papers like the birds outside are lining their nests. They inspire matchy-matchy hues.
I mean, look at the office chic colour palette. So sexy. But since I’m a writer first, the letter is what really sings. A few lines from the letter this month:
“I am so good at collecting books, letters, and pretty papers. But lately, there has been a "someday" weariness to my collection. Will that someday come?”
This time the letter is about lawn people vs garden people.
“I like to grow nectar bars. I grow things with petals that make flying things want to sit on those petals. Then I gaze lovingly at the flying things on the petals. It's a simple pleasure.”
This month I signed every letter, too, because it seemed like the right thing to do. I think I’ll keep doing it. The act of it was meditative and, in a way, I felt closer to the person who would get the letter.
Now that most people have stopped reading, I can admit my failure of the month.
I thought for Lent, or maybe for a sort of New Year’s resolution, I would paint a letter a day. Then post it on Instagram. I made it to Day 7 and gave up. Too hard. Largely too hard on myself to perform. Dance Monkey Dance! And not completing a painting and posting it made me feel bad about myself. Plus with it being Lent, that feeling was compounded by Catholic guilt, which is a real thing.
The idea was inspired by a bunch of Instagrammers who seem to be better at everything. I guess the lesson here is to not compare myself. I did… and do… feel bad about the failed project, especially after publicly announcing it.
I thought a painting-a-day would make my Instagram explode, which would help my mail club explode, which is what I really want.
I like the mail club best of all. It’s the long term love. That painting-a-day thing? Just a fling.
I offer up this little Lent experiment to remind anyone out there that fails are valuable, too.
Even Amazon failed to title my notecards and notebooks correctly. They only fixed it yesterday and the products have been on sale for a month. Geesh!
So fails happen. The key is to do it all, I suppose. Learn from it and go from there.
Janice
PS Three things:
