Pen Pal Match Up Opens Again: One for Adults, One for Kids

We’re doing it again! We’ve done a few pen pal match ups in the past which have always been exhilarating, consuming, exciting and a lot of fun. Lately, with so many of you in unusual circumstances, some of you with more time on your hands than you’ve usually had, we’ve been receiving more requests to run our pen pal match again, and so here we are. We are nothing if not here to meet your stationery needs, which occasionally may involve finding you someone to write to.

As always, how it’s worked is that we give everyone a week or so to fill in our form, and we gather all of your pertinent information. We sit, accumulating paper cuts as we sort you all the best we can, and then you are emailed the name and complete mailing address of someone. You write this person the first letter. Someone else will receive your name and mailing address and write to you first. Theoretically, everyone should end up with two new pen pals.

We try to match people up based on the incredibly nuanced information we gather in our survey, intuition and gut feel. We do occasionally also get to know people in store and or through online, and have thought to ourselves these two people would really get along, but mostly we trust in serendipity and the fact that pen people are great people and even if you’re not a pen person you’re still pretty great.

For the first time, we’re also doing a kids pen pal match up. We have been asked a lot about doing one for kids, and we’ve always balked because there’s no way for us to provide any sort of security or screening of any kind. But, these are wild times, and it would be fun to connect with other kids around the world. We are all in this together. Adults, of course, as you all always do, watch out for your kids, and use your discretion and wisdom in monitoring their correspondence.

We implore you to be patient and understanding with us in the relatively unlikely but still very possible event that one or both (!) of your pen pals unfortunately does not respond. In the past we have had a secondary pool of sad people who didn’t catch any fish the first time around, and if we gather enough of the unjoined we’ll do it again this time.

If, after all this, you’re ready to break out that pad of nice stationery, please sign up below:

Adult Sign Up Form

Kids Sign Up Form

Share widely!

Please sign up by Tuesday April 7th. We will be sorting and emailing out pen pals after that. We are going to try and get all the emails out by April 12th. Please double check your junk or spam folders if you haven’t received anything by then. Life happens—don’t we all know it now—but please try your best to commit to writing to both of your pen pals.

If you’re curious about how previous pen pal match ups have gone, you can check out this blog post.