Photo montage of actual postcard stories, written on both side, within the white margins, onto the photo, smudges and all! Reading them is not for the fainthearted!

A postcard story is literally just that.  It is a story written within the physical confines of a postcard, though I am bending these boundaries more and more as I now write on the front of the postcard – I love those with a wide white border all around – and I have even as a last measure written on the actual picture of the postcard, physically hard to do as the ink doesn’t always show up.  And now with some of the postcard stories, when I mail the cards for that the week off, I will tell the happy recipient to put the postcard in the light under a lamp, because at the right angle of light, you can read the writing from the indentations made by the ballpoint pen. 

Years ago, a friend said that I demand a lot from my readers, and he was speaking of the content and style of writing, and this was and is still is true, yes, that I admit – some of my readers are now demanding more periods and fewer commas and all sorts of other things…  And because of how much I sort of manage to write on the postcards, I text all the recipients of the postcards that I have processed the story so I can email them a more readable version if they wish, for my writing in the postcard message section is small, of course, and dense, always, and my handwriting…

My grammar school teachers were always returning papers to me demanding that I cross my t’s and dot all my i’s and lots of other things too, which I don’t even remember now, obviously.  But now I do go back to the postcard and cross my t’s and dot my i’s and fill out some letters more so they don’t look starved – a direct quote and criticism from one of my teachers!  However, even then, some of my teachers liked what I wrote, especially my 8th grade teacher, Sister Mary Thomas, my favorite grammar school teacher.  One day, she wanted me to write a paper for a contest with the American Legion or some such organization on liberty or freedom, though I don’t remember the exact topic now.  Then, at least three times, she returned it to me to write again so that it would have no errors or cross-outs because she wanted to it to be as perfect as she thought I could make it – which was perfect!  I was getting tired of the paper and annoyed with the whole process and with her, but even then, I knew she was pushing me to do my best because she believed in me and I responded, thus making me one of her favorites and she the type of teacher every student should have at least once in their life coupled with the insight of a prepared heart to know when such a teacher came along and was in proximity.  I had two such teachers in my life.  Some days or weeks later, a man came into our classroom, and I was one of three students our teacher called up to the front as winners in the essay contest.  I won second place!  I was surprised, but impressed with what I could actually achieve by dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.  However, I digress in my writing, of course, as always.

So the postcard stories are actual stories written on the back of postcards – most from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – the museum, second only to just New York City itself as a whole, my most very best favorite place in the city, a place of whole days and many wonderful hours of imbibing the almost infinite number of historical and art treasure within.  I bought two boxes of one hundred postcards each from the museum shop and it is upon these cards that I mainly write the stories.

I send the postcard stories to my daughters, sisters, and grandchildren in a rotating schedule I have written down so I can keep track of who is receiving a card when.  I now write at least one postcard story each weekday morning, one of my two writing exercises of the day, before I move on to other scheduled items.  I mail out two or three postcard stories a week, so I have a continuing process for these stories.

I select the postcard loosely based on the intended recipient, and very loosely on the story that I imagine may go with it.  Many times, I write the story for or to the recipient, or actually place them within the story.  For one of the recipients of these postcards, when I write stories for her, I have been creating a consistent persona as a fairly cranky art critic; always playing her as perhaps she did not get her coffee or pan dulce that morning.  Sometimes the stories have nothing to do with the person receiving the card, and a few times a story is only just initially tied to the postcard itself. 

So far, the only real consistencies to the stories is that the gender of the recipient and of the character are the same, and that most of the stories still deal primarily with the inner story of the character.  Now, surprisingly, and yet exciting to me, is that when I begin to write a story, I usually have an idea where the story is headed, but now, I’m beginning to see that the story, after a while, is essentially writing itself, depending upon where the character is and where the person is going.  Sometimes, and more frequent now, I am surprised where the story goes and after finishing a story, I have said, “Wow, I really didn’t see that one coming”.  And with essentially all the postcard stories, as with all my writing it seems, once I start writing, what eventually comes out is much better than what I could have imagined or planned from the beginning.  For me, that is a joy of writing, and I suspect most writers, and most people in any creative field, would say the same.

Lastly, what I write on the postcard is what I process and that is what I post.  At times, I will go back onto the postcard and add a comma or change the tense of a verb or add a word – making it easier for the recipient to understand but harder to read – but I do not further edit.  That is why the postcard stories at times are a bumpy ride, and if the character’s thoughts are scattered, well, yes, they are scattered.  I actually like the imperfect feel to the writing, as that is a great part of what life is all about.  In addition, I enjoy these stories as a great warm-up exercise for my pencil, mind and heart, in the morning.  And most of the stories begin with “…” because that’s where all stories start, somewhere in the uninterrupted flow of the person’s life, and because every person is coming from somewhere and going somewhere, and even though I don’t even know in any depth all things about the person of the stories, I recognize their existence before my pencil touches their life and their continuation with their life after my pencil stops its contemplation upon their lives, and that’s life, and this is one reason why I write.

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