Established in spring 2022, Snail Mail @ Brown encourages a return to traditional forms of communications — letter writing and journaling — through their weekly Monday meetings and a wide variety of club events.
The club’s weekly meetings follow a “drop-in” policy that doesn’t strictly enforce attendance. This draws a variety of students, according to Anna Ryu ’25, who started attending club meetings toward the end of spring 2022.
“It welcomes people to come in whenever they can, and you never walk in and feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve missed out,’” said Ryu, adding that the organizers are always “happy to welcome you and show you where things are.”
“There’s always a pretty good circulation of people coming through,” Ryu added. “I always see new faces.”
The club was founded out of a desire to form a letter-writing club on campus, according to Emily Sun ’24, president of Snail Mail.
“I wanted to celebrate the joys of a handwritten letter, and to encourage this traditional form of communication,” Sun said. “I also wanted to connect people through letter writing (and) to create a community.”
Similarly, Julie Yeo ’24, vice president of Snail Mail, added that the club “was really spurred by (a) personal interest in stationery and journaling.” Yeo and Sun connected through this interest — the story of Snail Mail’s beginning “is also the story of how Emily and I met,” Yeo said.
According to Yeo, the club employs themes for its meetings, which are typically held on Mondays from 7-9 p.m. in Page-Robinson 501. “Anyone who comes is free to do whatever they want,” she said. “It’s a very low barrier to participation.”
Snail Mail’s last meeting was themed “Leave a letter, take a letter,” where students were encouraged to leave a letter they wrote to another Snail Mail member in a basket, and then take a letter written by someone else on their way out.
“Reading somebody else’s letter and seeing how much care they put into it, just decorating it and writing a very sweet message, that just lifted my mood, even though I was in a really stressful midterm grind,” Yeo said.
Past meetings have centered around writing a letter to send back home and wellness day, according to Sun.
The club aims to create “a chill, relaxing space for people to get away from their day-to-day responsibilities … that require more energy mentally,” Yeo said.
“A lot of people … don’t have the space to relax” at Brown, Sun told The Herald. Snail Mail was envisioned as a potential outlet to fill this gap. “We want to encourage people to take time to reflect (and) to write letters to loved ones.”
“It was a really inviting environment to just come and slow down, and … to really intentionally be with yourself,” Ryu said. “The reason I go back … (is to) have a dedicated time and a dedicated space to just sit and journal for a bit.”
Building community was also central to the founding principles of Snail Mail.
Ryu recalled someone preparing cups of “really lovely tea” for one of the weekly meetings and walking around the room to offer them to other students. “Sometimes a member will even bring food that they’ve cooked,” she added. “It’s a very personal and intimate community.”
“Just building a cute, wholesome community, I think, is really what I wanted,” Yeo said.
Sun and Yeo also aimed to make stationery — which can be expensive — accessible to members. “If you come to a general Snail Mail meeting, you’ll have access to all our supplies … we always provide all of our materials (for) free,” Yeo said.
But this commitment to accessibility comes with challenges: “We’ve been trying to encourage people to come in and engage with the community, instead of just coming in for the free stuff,” Sun said.
The holidays, a time “when we really want to emphasize the connecting of people,” are a particularly busy time for Snail Mail, Yeo said. “It’s nice to take that special opportunity to celebrate people and connect with them, (and) maybe even give them a little memento.”
Sun recalled a time when Snail Mail was tabling on the Main Green for their Valentine’s Day event and President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 walked by. “I convinced her to come and sit down, and she wrote a letter to her husband, which was really cute,” Sun said.
Despite the club being relatively new, Sun described Snail Mail as “well received.”
“Around 100 people” attended their wellness day in March, according to Sun.
Another goal of Snail Mail is to break away from electronic forms of communication.
“These days, the majority of our communications … happen online: social media, email, etc.,” Yeo said. “There’s something just really nice and genuine about getting a handwritten letter, a handwritten card, taking the time to make something for somebody else.”
“The joy of opening a letter and receiving a letter in the mail … is so different from just receiving a text,” Sun said.
Ryu told The Herald that “there’s something about putting the pen on paper (that) forces you to slow down” when “technology speeds (us) up mentally.”
“I think we can all benefit from just slowing down a little,” she added.
