Return to sender: why letters are the new email

FOR a long letter she might use a phone bill. For a short one, a ticket stub or a beer coaster … perhaps following it with something on the back of a postcard.

Marieke Hardy has been a voracious letter writer since her late teens. ''I like the visual nature of writing on the back of bills, old envelopes, paper you find,'' she says. ''It adds your personality to the letter, people get the parts of your life.''

She still has a file of letters she wrote to politicians, albeit not on the back of shopping lists. Bill Heffernan, Joan Kirner and Bill Bryson were frequent recipients. Aden Ridgeway was on the end of an angry epistle after forcing Natasha Stott Despoja to retire.

''I wrote to the people that make my lipstick and just told them they make a really great lipstick,'' Hardy says. ''Before I was a vegan, I wrote to the people who make my cereal just because I found the flavours utterly delicious. There's something about receiving a hand-written letter.''

Combining her love of animals and letter writing, she has started a monthly literary event, Women of Letters, celebrating the lost art of letter writing and raising money for an animal shelter.

Hardy invites artistic Australian women to pen a letter and read it to an audience, who then compose their own during the break. The popular Melbourne event will come to Sydney for the first time tomorrow. Held at Red Rattler in Marrickville, it will feature Hardy and the co-curator, Michaela McGuire, as well as Tara Moss, Jennifer Byrne, Claudia Karvan, Virginia Gay, the singer Sally Seltmann, Triple J's Zan Rowe and the actress Sacha Horler.

''Someone wrote a letter to me in the break,'' says Gay, a former All Saints actress, who will present a letter tomorrow. ''An ex-nurse who said she was a fan of All Saints and just said ''Thank you so much'. It was the best fan mail I ever received.''

Computerisation and busy lifestyles have all but pushed letter writing off the radar.

There is a beautiful patience required for sending letters back and forth; a ''romanticism that is slightly lost'', Hardy says. ''We need to remember to slow down.''

The event has caused some euphoric reactions. Noni Hazlehurst, the musician Clare Moore and Sophie Black, the editor of Crikey, sat backstage drinking wine, completely ''enamoured with each other'' until they were kicked out.

''They form great bonds,'' Hardy says.

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