the story I want to remember (papercamp 5)

Fun fact: Alex and I first met 19 years ago at a conference in Paris where, coincidentally, I was speaking about something I referred to as the Papernet. Amazingly there are no photographs, that I could find online, of either of us speaking. This is a nice passage that Jeremy Keith wrote about the event at the time.

That is a convenient segueway to mention that this presentation is heavy on images containing texts which may not be exemplars of legibility. Because I can’t see any of you to read the expressions on your faces, I am going to try speaking slower than I normally do to give you a chance to read these texts. I will pause noticeably after each slide which I hope won’t come off as an affectation.

When I was a young boy I was taken to visit Europe. The trip was a kind of post-war, middle-class American Grand Tour led by someone who had devoted their career to arts education. I was encouraged to keep a daily travel diary. I did not. In all honestly I don’t regret not having a record of my pre-teen self grousing about old buildings and empty amphitheaters.

Years later I learned about, and very much saw the value in, a travel diary that my grandfather, then a young man, had kept as he traveled around Europe in the months before the start of World War Two. To this day, I still don’t keep travel diaries but I still always think about them.

I am not sure when I started sending hand-made postcards in earnest. It did not occur to me to take pictures of them at the time. I think it must have been when I was traveling back and forth between in the East and West coasts of the United States a lot for work.

I distinctly remember sending a postcard about wanting to torment the robot vacuum cleaners at JFK once, although I couldn’t tell you who I sent it to. There were a lot of postcards about airports because time spent in an airport affords just the right amount of time to create something by hand, and with a little bit of effort, but without so much time that you fall in to the trap of making it precious.

After the airport postcards came the hotel coffee postcards. I suppose it is possible that I developed a weird, yet genuine, affinity for hotel coffee by virtue of sharing my experience of it with people. Most of these were “missive”-style postcards. Short observations written in big, blocky letters on the front. There was never enough time to make them sign-painter perfect and so I stopped trying.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to recognize these as a kind of travel diary. They were the story I wanted to remember. Like these assholes.

A few years ago, during an extended stay in Montreal, I decided to embrace this idea by producing “Day one, Day two, Day three…” and so on postcards.

Generally one card a day, usually about something which had happened the day before, typically made over coffee in the morning and then just as quickly sent away via the post. It’s a funny way to tell a story, whether to yourself or someone else, but I think there was also something else at work; something I will come back to in a moment.

This manner of producing postcards lends itself to the ample commentary and abundant downtime afforded by vacations abroad, and they have since become a staple of those trips.

This is a postcard from a trip to Portugal in 2019.

This is a postcard from a trip to Italy in 2022. I think this was the first trip to adopt the day (n) format.

This is a postcard we sent to the nice restaurant manager in Melbourne who let us sit at the bar and order some desperately needed coffee even though the restaurant was busy with dinner service.

It is not often you meet people who will also pore you a drink, to go along with your coffee, even when they are aware that you’re obviously not telling the truth about having just arrived in Australia and are suffering from jet lag. I hope the card reached him.

This is a postcard from the past summer in Montreal. It was sent to one of the people we’d spent the night with in the postcard from Italy that I mentioned a moment ago. It was about an evening spent with the people who, previously, had been sent said postcard from Italy.

If you make enough word and phrase based postcards you start to be able to intuit how large letters need to be to fill the page without wrapping lines or breaking texts. I don’t know why it’s important to me. Maybe it’s a way to try and compensate for the wonder and learned helplessness at how computers can do this so effortlessly.

Which may also explain why I built a little web application to create these letterbox postcards. Cards without the boxes but with pixel perfect letter-sizes and spacing. It’s called postcard for what I hope are obvious reasons despite not being specific to postcards at all.

To date these not-hand-drawn postcards have been reserved for quotes and passages from books I’ve been reading; a kind of shout-out to Russell Davies’ (but actually Mike Migurski's) old Dog-Eared Books blog posts.

This is a passage from Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records: He made things up and thereby slowed time down ensuring that no matter how long the journey lasted we would never run out of history no matter how true or inaccurate it was.

So far the rule has been: I will use the postcard tool for other people’s observations and hand-made postcards for my own. It’s a pretty arbitrary rule and I am still trying to figure it out, let alone why it even matters. Which means that I find myself increasingly breaking it.

If you’ve spent any time online in the last 15 years it is probably hard not to look at these and see a kind of analog, paper-based and very slow form of social messaging. Which is what writing postcards has always been.

When Alex asked me to speak I immediately said yes but ever since then I’ve been trying to imagine what it was I might say besides everyone loves getting mail and it’s nice doing something for a person which signals to that person that you are thinking about them.

I suppose that I have always been aware that there was another motivation at work but there has never been occasion to talk about it because no one has ever asked me to before. In 2026, not being asked about something rarely prevents any of us from telegraphing whatever is on our mind anyway and I think that may be the point.

I am not here to judge. I am as guilty of EOBS, or Excessive Online Bloviating Syndrome, as the next person. I too have said things, in a social-messaging context, for the thrill of instant gratification be it likes, comments or really anything that might trigger a reaction from another person. Sometimes we do these things just to pretend that we are being heard.

Telegraphing intent, then, about the “meta project” of sending postcards would have been self-defeating in the extreme. The goal, after all, was to use the postcards, and not really the postcards themselves but the act of making and sending those postcards, as a way to practice the act of doing something which does not guarantee any kind of reciprocation.

Of sharing rather than broadcasting.

Here is a short list of the few things sending people postcards guarantees:

They will require if not effort, then at least deliberation and consideration. That effort will likely never be acknowledged, let alone reciprocated.

They can take a long time to get anywhere during which time they will get fucked up and be damaged in transit. They probably won’t be seen by many people. If you’re lucky a postcard will be hung on person’s fridge.

They may not be kept at all. Even when they are kept they may be hung upside down and who wants to be the asshole to point that out?

They may end up being sent to complete strangers because people will move without telling you their new address. Or you’ll spend years, like I have, sending mail to an old address by mistake. Personally, I kind of love it when this happens because it means an unexpected, and unexplained, surprise is landing in someone’s mailbox.

I find that all of these things are good exercises to keep one’s ego in check. Or at least mine. Not in a critical, self-flagellating, kind of way so much as something akin to what the author Kim Stanley Robinson has described as every day Buddhism.

That is, finding equilibrium and understanding with the universe less in specific religious practices than in everyday activities like changing a diaper, playing frisbee or washing the dishes.

Some of us were fortunate to be of an age when online social messaging afforded all the pleasures of traditional letter, or at least postcard, writing but in a way that seemed to transcend space, time and audiences alike. In a way that, for a fleeting moment anyway, was genuinely great.

Perhaps it was always going to be the case that the things which made social messaging novel and different would be what turned it sour. We all know what’s happened. It's a bloody tire-fire these days. Few are those who don’t eventually end up falling prey to the bad habits and bad behaviours that globalized social-messaging platforms bring out in each of us.

These are questions which are bigger than social messaging and postcards. We have been trying to find answers to them for at least as long as we have had the language to describe the questions. In the meantime, sending postcards are one quiet, personal way – my way – of trying to do better.

But mostly, people just like getting mail and it’s nice doing nice things for people.

Thank you.