I sent my first postcard, as a six-year old, to Olympian Mary Lou Retton, who returned an autographed black and white photo of herself in a wide smile and chic haircut. “‘GOOD LUCK USA ’84” it said.
There followed four relatively fallow decades for me as a postcard sender or receiver until last year, when I became enchanted by the infinite possibilities available in four by six inches.
I received at least five dozen and lost count of how many I stamped and disseminated. Once ubiquitous as correspondence, advertising and more, postcards in 2026 are exceptional: a bite-sized miracle that’s improved my relationships, my attention span, and my art and writing skills. And let me tell you about the surge of dopamine I routinely experience under the fluorescent lights of my local post office lobby.
Around the time I was embarking on my book tour last year, I had amassed several dozen vintage postcards from a lifetime of thrift-store forays: oddball 1960s hotel lobbies, corny Florida beaches, dusty national landmarks. They’re so inexpensive and so charming, I rarely resisted grabbing a few when I saw good ones. I’d occasionally tuck them into gift enclosures for friends but I used postcards sparingly compared with how fast I was accumulating them.
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With so many on hand and an imminent plan to travel to 18 states, the only solution was to distribute them widely. It’s taken me until middle age to remember that holding on to things I love is almost never as much fun as sending them out into the world.
I stamped 40 postcards and wrote my own address on the back. Because I wanted to spend part of my time on the road documenting the trip, I also packed some postcard-sized watercolor paper and paint.
At bookstores, I arrayed the cards in front of readers while I signed books and encouraged people to take one and send me a note about anything on their minds. “Or take a card home and if you don’t write to me maybe it will remind you to write someone else in your life,” I always suggested.
People told me they love mail but never send it, that they only get bills in the mailbox, that they kept all of their high-school boyfriend’s letters, that they have three email accounts and all of them are full of garbage. I have five email accounts, I’d tell them, which generate even more garbage.
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I’m not naive enough to think I was starting a nationwide handwritten mail revolution, but these short conversations, like the postcards themselves, were satisfying and real. The cards were a tiny way to show my appreciation for the book buyers I met but also a secret way for me to seed meaningful exchanges with strangers. (Even memoirists tire of talking about themselves at some point.)
Interstitial moments on the tour were filled with brief notes to friends, or if I had more time and the right mood, a little watercolor of a great omelette I ate in LA, the facade of a tavern in Cincinnati, or whatever I saw and wanted to remember. A big frameable oil painting on canvas is a commitment, but postcards are practically scrap paper and can be completed in the brief window an impulse lasts.
Early on, I deemed myself as worthy a recipient of these tiny missives as anyone else. I wanted to discover what would happen to these cherished little cards on their journey through bureaucracy. And of course I wondered: who might get a glimpse or read a few lines and how might that change what I write?
Given the current state of the US Postal Service, it takes a real message-in-a-bottle level of blind faith to send any piece of mail these days but my postcards, each of them one-of-a-kind whether they were original paintings or Kodachrome wonders from decades ago, felt risky in a new way.
That little bump of danger was only the beginning. I have never regretted the minute or two I spend composing a note to someone. Half of the back of a postcard is the just-right size for a message, which the writer is free to lengthen or shorten by calibrating the size of their handwriting. Letters are intimidating.
Texts are disposable (and even editable or recallable for those plagued by second thoughts). There’s an improvisational freedom in a dashed-off few lines, written by a human hand with a pen and without much rumination. Even in the mere moments it takes to read or write a postcard, the brain is activating in ways it simply can’t with thumb-typing. And how beguiling to see the way a friend or lover loops their vowels or blurs the dots above letters, so much richer than the emoji-punctuated texts I’m guilty of sending a lot more often than I send postcards.
Some proponents of the nouveau analog movement will brag about bricking their smartphones all weekend or raw-dogging a cross-country flight, but that kind of bravado really isn’t necessary. I have a job. I have a teenager. I’d obviously be dead meat without my iPhone, but becoming a postcard person hasn’t made me into a luddite.
Writing, or reading, a postcard is a miniature but significant 60-second connection with someone else. The kind of thing almost everyone on Earth urgently needs now more than ever. Call it a meditation or an intention if you frame the world that way. Postcards are just a little flourish you can add into your rotation of texts and Slacks and however else you constantly communicate, and they generate such profound rewards.
Seven months ago I took part in a book festival in Nashville. To pass some time I painted the circus-like tents set up on its capitol mall. The stripes and primary colors felt old-fashioned and pure, much like the festival itself which united thousands of readers and hundreds of writers, and that day was sharing space with a spirited No Kings rally despite some oppressive humidity.
I’m an absolute amateur at painting, long reconciled to accepting my efforts as meditative for me but not gallery material. But this one was good: the red and white and yellow parallel stripes against a sapphire southern sky. It was also a perfect capsule of my really happy afternoon in an unfamiliar city. I couldn’t wait to see it pop up five states away.
I walk into the harshly lit post office most weekdays with a welcome sense of anticipation. Sometimes my PO box is empty. Sometimes, I find catalogs and invoices and tucked among them are a picture postcard or two.
When my own inept but genuine little pictures show up I get a minute to fondly remember a place or some people from a few weeks back. My paintings are returned to me with a patina of their journey – a subtle orange sorting barcode, a nick off the corner.
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On the back of an image of Historic Williamsburg, a guy wrote to me about the best Chinese food in San Antonio. A woman from a Detroit suburb wrote me about something her father had in common with mine, on a card featuring an oversized cactus in a cotton candy sunset.
Maybe it’s a symptom of digital fatigue but I think I could go the rest of my life without ever again interacting with those cartoonish avatars of my friends that emerge in group chats or the realer-than-real AI videos of a shih tzu icing a birthday cake. Isn’t it infinitely better to get lost in the turquoise of an ocean scene from some vacation spot in an era when the world’s water was bluer?
This many months later I should probably write off the Nashville painting as the single anomaly in all these dozens that never made it home. I was sure I mailed it so maybe it’s lodged between something mechanical in a letter-sorting machine in Tennessee. Or maybe that one slipped out of my outgoing pile and wafted into the No Kings crowd or got swept up in the book festival refuse. Or maybe I misaddressed it, or it misdelivered. My little painting could be displayed on some stranger’s bedroom bureau right now or it could show up in tomorrow’s post office haul. I suppose I don’t really need that particular rendering of that Nashville afternoon; I bet there are six thousand pictures of it on Instagram right now. Even so, I’m happy I get to carry that little iota of hope into my next mail run.
