Write an Unforgettable Love Letter: an Online Event

Write an Unforgettable Love Letter: An online event

Saturday, February 6th – 1 p.m. PST / 4 p.m. EST

This Valentine’s Day, don’t send a hallmark card, chocolate, socks or a sweater. 

Instead, write an unforgettable love letter.

Even for seasoned writer (and sometimes especially for a seasoned writer), writing a love letter can be daunting, because love is an emotion, an experience, a story, a mystery.  It’s a moveable feast! 

Writing is an act of love.

Rumi says of love – “we have to keep breaking our heart until it opens.”

Because love is so complicated, it’s sometimes hard to express our loving feelings toward a lover, a child, a parent, a friend.  Love is what brings us into the world and fills us with meaning and carries us through the decades.  

Writing a love letter is the ultimate expression – it brings in poetry and humor, geography, success and failure.  By exploring feelings through metaphor, the Homeric Convention and other poetic explorations, we can create a memorable letter that will be unfolded and reread for many years. 

After my father died, I wrote a love letter to my father’s best friend Vonnie. My brother told me she physically collapsed on his doorstep after learning my father was dead. I spent days creating that letter, pulling out memories, apologizing, and thanking her for enriching my father’s life.  She never wrote back, but after she died, her

husband Bill called me, and he said, “Vonnie read that letter so much she had to make a copies of it.”  

Why didn’t she tell me? 

“Oh honey,” he said, “it just wasn’t Vonnie’s way. But I wanted you to know.”  

All that matter is I learned – years later – that letter was received. When I was writing it, I wrote it for all three of us – my father, me and Vonnie. And later, I put the act of writing that letter in a story to you.

When I was moving from a home I loved, a home where my daughter labored my granddaughter into being ness with her partner, where I fell in love and out of love, where friends visited and where I bonded with my granddaughter, I sat down and wrote a love letter to my old stone plantation house.  I sent the letter to my landlord the week I was moving. I cried all over that letter, and she received the words with gratitude, and said she had similar memories in the house and the letter flooded her with love.

In this two hour class, you will:

• Receive inspiration through poetry and famous love letters.

• Create a letter with words your lover, daughter, son, parent, friend or spouse or a place you have loved.

• Practice explorations through three pre-writing exercises to help you invite Cupid’s Muse into your descriptions before you write your letter.

• Pull romantic phrases from a sentence wall to incorporate into your letter, or change to Make your own.

• After inspiration and writing exercises, write your love letter in a 13-minute timed writing exercise.

• Read your love letter to a writing teacher in a small group of nine writers to receive feedback.

• Non writers, all genders welcome into this class, because everyone has someone they love.

Some words are meant to be created with ink, folded into an envelope sealed and stamped.  Your letter, should you choose to accept this writing challenge, will travel from hands in bins, across oceans, 30,000 feet in the air, and into the heart of someone you love.