Letters from Grand Marais

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Handwrite or draw a letter or postcard today — and mail it.

You'll feel both free and full: free of screens with their algorithmic manipulations and culture war distractions, full of your best self. Reunited with your essential goodness.

Crucially, you'll also be reunited with the best selves of others when you set the paper letter trail in motion and others gleefully reciprocate. A letter! A real letter!

Surely that's a state of civic well-being and well-wishing we crave now.

This is the conclusion I've reached after working 500-plus hours at Letteracy Deck, the world's first and only free, public outdoor letter-writing park that I created in June 2023 on the shores of Lake Superior in Grand Marais. Writing, drawing and mailing frames the short, clear heart truths we feel, but rarely share.

Perhaps now more than ever, we need to share through handwritten correspondence —that millennia-old slow, soft, gentle medium of connection. We have rope burns on our spirits from post-election friction. The sincere, but light touch a letter brings is a genuine salve.

Since Letteracy Deck first opened, I've talked with approximately 5,000 tourists and helped them create and mail more than 7,000 cards and letters. While we closed for the season last month, I likely will mail hundreds more on Dec. 6 and 7 when Letteracy Deck reopens indoors at Lake Superior Trading Post for Holiday Harbor Village.

From this immersion in public conversation over the past two years, I know firsthand how decent, good, kind and interesting we are as a species — a letter-writing and -reading species.

As with our summer Letteracy Deck, our indoor holiday version will provision visitors with free stationery and stamps as well as help children create cards and write letters — Santa included. "Public" means everyone is welcome at Letteracy Deck at no cost: just write or draw to anyone, anywhere in the world.

I expect the post-election winter weekend to be every bit as joyful, relaxing, renewing, respectful and politics-free as the summer and fall sessions have been.

Why? Because handwriting and drawing a simple message slows us down. It compels us to dwell in friendly and loving thoughts of another human being who is personally meaningful and known to us, to be in relationship, and to crave being together in embodied relationship once again.

By contrast, online communication zips past meaning, empathy and personal relationship, sparks flying. It seeks to speed us up, objectify others as problems or enemies, then trips a cortisol-adrenaline buzz that goads us into hurling flaming tridents of ill will to revile Others.

I conceived and developed the concept of a free, public letter-writing park in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Grand Marais nonprofit I lead, Minnesota Children's Press, (minnchildpress.org) is committed to mentoring rural children ages 5 to 15 in our applied literacy and entrepreneurial children's publishing club called Story Scouts (storyscouts.org).

We research, write and publish books, newspapers, letters and more. To meet safely outdoors in the spirit of the Norwegian concept of "friluftsliv" (outdoor love) during the pandemic — a worrisome time of school closures and social isolation — I rented an office with a large outdoor deck. We were on the main street of Grand Marais, right next to a harbor of Lake Superior with a view that offered a detailed study of tourists. It quickly became clear that families arrive in Grand Marais as three generations with vastly different abilities for vacation activities — needing a walker, a stroller, a dog-friendly setting, a rigorous workout and a free place to just be.

I wondered: How and where could they all find the peace of mind to tell and to hear the family North Shore canon, the generational stories of cabins, canoes and trails?

At just this time, when Story Scouts were writing a blizzard of letters outside on a deck, the Blandin Foundation of Grand Rapids announced a new tourism innovation grant opportunity. They requested something they'd never heard of. I delivered; I made up something no one had ever heard of. I won Blandin support in 2023 to create Letteracy Deck. In 2024, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board awarded major funding to expand it, as did local businesses and service clubs such as the Lions.

Minnesota Children's Press intends to extend the letter-writing park concept in a pilot study of six to eight other rural Minnesota communities to assess Letteracy Deck's impact on other tourist venues. If results are positive, we envision formalizing a nonprofit model of letter writing as infrastructure for public good and establishing Letteracy Decks throughout the state. Minnesota, let there be letters — a land of letters!

This seems both plausible and desirable, given all the visitors' voices of appreciation. Here's a sample of a few:

• A family of nine visited from a town in southern Minnesota, taking their first vacation ever. They saved to fund it for two years. At Letteracy Deck, they spent the afternoon writing letters — to each other, thanking each other. The mother explained the choice of the North Shore for their first vacation this way: "Lake Superior is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I was in my 40s before I saw it. I didn't want my children to have to wait that long."
• An extended family with friends — 23 in all, most from Germany — escaped unseasonable 80-ish degrees in Duluth. When the correspondents learned we provide free international stamps, they each wrote postcards and letters home, babies included, with one happily inserting the marker between her toes to scrawl away.
• A retired professor of tourism from Indiana was stunned to learn Letteracy Deck existed, just as Letteracy Deck was stunned to learn a professorship of tourism existed! Looking up from the card he was writing to gaze at Lake Superior, he said, "This is such an amazing project in its simplicity and its power to bring people together by just being positive."

Positivity is power. And it's a cleanse. Reflective writing and drawing to connect resets and rinses your inner life to its natural speed, scope and shine. It illuminates all —for the good.

Reflect and connect with me on the power of letters to regenerate civil society. Write to Letteracy Deck, P.O. Box 301, Grand Marais, MN 55604.

Anne Brataas writes, teaches and leads the Minnesota Children's Press, a nonprofit she founded in 2019. She lives in Grand Marais.