On the sun-soaked Monday morning of April 26, a group of five students gathered at the wooden benches outside Zelnick Pavilion. Carrying Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and rolls of wall-safe tape, they split up in teams of two. Jenna Handler ’24, Mallory Elliott ’23, Libby Beers ’23, Cassidy McDonough ’24, and Ellis Collier ’22 were on a mission—a mission to distribute letters, intended never to be sent, around campus for students to find, and, eventually, create themselves.

These letters, marked with neon highlighter labels reading  “Open Me” and “Dear You,” were stuffed and placed, taped and hung by Handler and the rest of her group in Usdan, Exley, the CFA, on poles and on benches while the rest of campus was still waking up that Monday morning. 

This mysterious literary scavenger hunt was the brainchild of Jenna Handler ’24. Early in quarantine, she began to write letters to friends with whom she had fallen out of touch.

“This started like a year and a half ago,” Handler said. “Writing letters to people I’ve lost touch with was something that I did for a while, and I was just curious what other people might think of it and what stories they might share through that. I wanted to collect letters that people wrote that they didn’t intend to send to anyone. I had no idea what I wanted to do with them, but I wanted to do something creative that showcased them.”

After taking the semester off in the fall of 2020, Handler posted in the Facebook group WesAdmits to see whether anyone would be interested in collaborating to make the project happen. Through that post she found Collier and Ava Danieu ’23, among others who helped her to bring the project to fruition. Elliott, who got involved with the project through the WesAdmits post, began working on the initiative after sending letters during COVID-19 lockdown. 

“With some of my college friends who like, I mean, I [could] zoom with them,” Elliott said. “But sending a letter, this was just like a nice way to stay in touch in like a very intentional way.”

Because of the group’s focus on collaboration, it has changed a lot from what Handler originally envisioned. 

“I think my first idea was to do some sort of montage [style] film with people reading the letters, like voice over it,” Handler said. 

However, the team went in a bit of a different direction, which evolved into the event that occurred on April 26. Prior to that day, the team had met weekly to plan the initiative. One day a few weeks before the event’s official launch, the team met, along with volunteers, to illustrate, annotate and embroider the letters to make them more visually interesting and artistic. 

“We looked at all of them and came up with some different artistic ways to express them, like looking at a letter and trying to turn it into a poem or a collage,” Handler said. “We all took a few letters and asked some friends to read the letter, think about how they felt, and then create some sort of artistic expression based off of it.”

On the inside of the envelopes, the discoverer could find a letter written to a specific addressee, as well as a Spotify code, poem or drawing. Additionally, inside the envelope was an instruction to go to Zelnick Pavilion, where the letter reader could find Handler and the rest of her team with letter supplies so that students could make their own letters. 

Most of the letters are themed around lost relationships—both romantic and platonic. Handler’s intention with creating this initiative was to connect people over the shared experiences. 

“I thought writing these letters was cool and I just wanted to see what other people came up with,” Handler said. “But, [also] just kind of creating a sense of community and connectivity through a lot of experiences of loss and misconnection.”

After distributing the letters all around campus, the team took shifts in the Zelnick Pavilion to assist people who had found the letters to create their own letters. At the end of the day, nearly 25 people had come in and created letters, which occupied three of Zelnick’s glass walls. 

While Handler knew that she wanted people to find the letters and come to Zelnick to create something of their own, she was surprised by the reaction people had to the project.

“I was just really impressed by the care that people took with it when they came to Zelnick,” Handler said. “I expected a lot more people to kind of show up and be curious. Then see that it was what it was and kind of leave, or maybe write something really quickly. But a lot of people who came really sat for a while and really thought about it. You could tell, like when they put it up on the wall, a lot of the letters were really serious and really thoughtful. I hope that it inspired people to think a little bit more about their own relationships.”

McDonough, Handler’s current roommate, manned the Zelnick letter-making station for part of the day on April 26. While she had expected people to come, write letters and tape them up to the wall, she found that some people took it in a different direction. 

“Two people just told me like, ‘Oh no, like you guys hid the letters. Like, I’m going to go hide my letter,’” McDonough said.  “There’s more letters out there than we set out, which is kind of fun. It was a little bit experimental. There were no set rules for how we wanted or intended this to go. People could kind of make it in whatever direction they wanted.”

Handler expects that the letters will have their own legacy at the University, partially due to the organizers’ lack of observation of the student letter writers, and certain logistical slip-ups on the part of the organizers. 

“We had forgot to put a date on them and they all say to come to Zelnick today,” Handler said. “People will probably continue to find them, continue to interact with them, but I’m super open with it being this continuous open thing that people take what they got from it, the rest of the semester and beyond.”

If you don’t find a leftover mystery letter or didn’t get a chance to participate in the project on April 26, McDonough offered some advice. 

“If anyone feels inspired by this, they should just write letters.”

Annika Shiffer-Delegard can be reached at ashifferdele@wesleyan.edu.