Happy New Year!

Dear Readers,

    Happy new year! Well, yesterday I posted my 365th letter and it will be off in the mail after the holiday. It’s been an amazing year, with plenty of surprises and a few days I thought the project might not continue. But through hell and high water, the letters went out. A number of lovely replies came back, and often not from where I would expect. I began a correspondence with a woman in prison, heard from Tony Blair and the president of Liberia (or at least their representatives), and got a hand written note from the founder of IKEA.
    I will continue to write, post and send letters in the new year, though not each day. I am glad I made the commitment this year, and I learned that I can indeed stick to a writing practice, but there were a few too many nights when I fell asleep next to my daughter while putting her to bed, only to jolt myself awake at ten thirty and rush to the computer to blearily peck out a note to someone. I also learned a great deal about myself. This is not a confessional type of blog like many of the diarists out there write, but early on I saw patterns in my own interests, what drew me to a subject around which to form a letter. I often found myself writing on behalf of someone I thought was unjustly fired. Animal rights, human rights, censorship, and other themes came up a few times. On several occasions I could not resist the urge to write something a little snarky or satirical.
    So what have I accomplished at the end of all this? It feels good to have completed what I set out to do. Maybe I stirred things up a bit. After perusing several news sites every day for a year, I actually feel a little less optimistic about the power of the individual than when I started out. But based on a couple of e-mails I got, my efforts did make a difference in peoples’ lives, and that alone makes the effort worthwhile. Above all I hope that someone out there who has stumbled upon this blog decides to become a squeaky wheel and write that letter to a senator, company, or whomever they’ve been meaning to contact but just hadn’t sat down to do it.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Comments

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[Antivirus_man]

You write well will be waiting for your new publications.

[blogginssyndicate]

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