I’ve seen you on the subway, rumpled, sleepy and slunk low in your seat. I wonder where you’re headed, what your job is like, what you think of me. It must be obvious that I want to impress you, that I care whether you find me clever, or funny or totally full of shit. Maybe that’s a bit desperate. But I do care, even when I wish I didn’t, even when I pretend you don’t exist, even when I convince myself that I’m only talking to myself here, my voice lost in a blizzard. But then I look up and I see you, the paper held loosely in your hands. I can’t help but wonder if your brow is drawn together out of absorption or suspicion. You are reading me right now. And for that, I love you.
OK, that felt weird. There are few things more powerful than the direct address, and the more personal the better. But the near delirious exposure of the love letter has mostly given way to 2am “where r u?” text messages and ambiguous Facebook pokes. When it’s so easy to admire someone from a comfortable electronic distance, it’s also easy to overlook the benefits of placing our hopes, desires and dignity on the line.

For Joshua Knelman, co-editor of Four Letter Word (Knopf Canada, $29.95, 272 pages), an anthology of fictional love letters by Canadian, British and US writers like Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Lethem, love letters are as dangerous as they are seductive. In Adam Thorpe’s contribution, for example, a feverish mash note sent by a lovestruck solicitor to a married lady he met at a fundraiser ends up being used as evidence in the unlucky fellow’s murder trial.

“Every love letter you write is a risk,” says Knelman. “You give something of yourself.” The act of editing Four Letter Word was itself an exercise in the art of woo; Knelman says the queries he and co-editor Rosalind Porter sent to their favourite authors requesting contributions were like love letters themselves. While most of their wish list signed on, there was some heartbreak. “We dealt with a lot of rejection,” he says. “The trick was never to be bitter. It was exciting just to receive a rejection, to know that we reached them.”

Reaching out to others is something Toronto artist Lauren Bride knows all about. A couple of years ago when curating a love-themed evening for the popular lecture night Trampoline Hall, Bride decided to write original love letters, pitched at an idealized reader, to be used as tickets for the evening. She wrote approximately 150 distinctly vulnerable and earnest letters in all — with passages like “please kiss me on my birthday” and “my grandmother is so fond of you” — attaching a small lock of her hair to each one. (You can view the surviving letters — some audience members insisted on taking theirs home — at Bride’s Flickr site, accessible through www.tinyurl.com/ysu484.)

Her attraction to the love letter is the way the form offers what she calls a “mediated intimacy.” (See, I was ripping her off there in the first paragraph.) Tellingly, the intensity of her letters led some people to believe that they had been written expressly for them, which made for an awkward moment or two.

“This guy asked me for a lot of hugs,” she says of the Trampoline Hall night. Strangers who live in far-off foreign lands have also been convinced that Bride was speaking straight to their (dare I say) soul. For Bride, the confusion of boundaries is part of the appeal. “A letter is nice because it is a direct line… There needn’t be any preamble. Using the second person is good, too, I think: it is nice speaking so directly and candidly to someone you have never met as if they are a close companion. This is also considered creepy, which I find great.” The tension between openness and anonymity continues to inspire Bride, and she will be showing related work at The Valentine’s Trunk Show on Feb. 10 (noon-5pm, The Workroom, 1340 Queen W.).

Part of our obsession with receiving declarations of appreciation is our (possibly narcissistic) longing to be seen. Knelman agrees that there is a complex voyeurism at play when we read love letters, whether they were written for us or not. It’s the impulse behind every maudlin mixtape and cribbed Leonard Cohen line (who, incidentally, is not only a contributor to Four Letter Word, but the inspiration for the project in the first place). And yet, it’s the letters we set down in our own voice — the ones that reveal as much about how we’ve come to understand ourselves as they do about how well we understand the object of our affection — that can alter the course of history (or at least your weekend).

Knelman refers to a single sentence in the letter contributed by Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — written in the voice of a hilariously haughty, somewhat reluctant, but ultimately sympathetic lover — as capturing the essence of our need to be recognized by another: “I like that you like me and that your liking me makes me like myself.” 

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