When you have a special relationship with someone, it can be challenging to communicate your true feelings by speaking with them. Sometimes it takes a letter – the actual process of sitting in front of a blank page, and letting your emotions guide you into writing down what that relationship really means to you. The same can be said about your relationship with your hometown – whether it’s the place you grew up, the place you call home now, or the place you’d like to retire someday. This CityLab article from Melody Warnick highlights fascinating projects that are inspiring people to share what they love about the cities they call home.
Toronto native Lindsay Zier-Vogel wants you to write a love letter to your city. Maybe something like this:
“Dear Toronto, You’re a big ol’ city but I love that I still have small world encounters on your streets.”
Or this:
“Dear Toronto, Sometimes I pretend your tall buildings are a pop-up book when I look at them from balconies. It’s beautiful.”
If Zier-Vogel happens to catch you walking by a table she’s set up for The Love Lettering Project, her homegrown effort to get people to praise their place, she’ll supply the paper, markers, and airmail envelopes. You just have to come up with the sentiment, in the form of a specific bit of praise for an event, a neighborhood, a restaurant, a store, a park, a tree, a building, or anything else that makes you feel more in love with where you live. For instance:
“I love how each of your neighbourhoods is like visiting a new world. It’s magic.”
Writing a love letter to your place is arguably easier than writing one to the object of your affection. Your city won’t reject you. It won’t analyze your letter for unintended insults.
Yet for most of us, complaining about where we live becomes as unconscious and automatic as breathing. Sometimes, says Zier-Vogel, a 35-year-old who’s lived in Toronto her entire life, passersby who see her Love Lettering Project booth propose to write a hate letter instead. They’ll rant for a few minutes about what they despise about Toronto, then storm off when they’re told that only love letters are allowed.
Eighty-five percent of the time, “those same people end up turning around and beelining back and saying, ‘I thought of something,'” she says. That’s the moment Zier-Vogel waits for, and really the whole point of the Love Lettering Project.
Writing an ode to your place forces you to reflect on and appreciate its assets, which makes you feel more place attached – which, in turn, makes you happier. “Once you start thinking about things that work in your city, you see the things that work in your city. It’s that inevitable lens shift,” she says.
Originally, the Love Lettering Project started as a whimsical personal exercise. Beginning in 2004, Zier-Vogel would periodically write love poems to the city, slip them into airmail envelopes, and hide them where strangers would stumble across them. One year she wrote 500 letters, secreting them all over town – on car windshields, inside library books. She loved the thrill of hiding the envelopes, the way it made the city exciting again.
Eventually, her friends who knew about the project were begging to join in. So in 2012, Zier-Vogel expanded her letter writing campaign into a broader initiative to get people to share their fond feelings for where they lived. Mostly she works in Ontario, but recently she’s taken her Love Lettering Project to cities in the Northwest Territories and the United Kingdom.
