Pen Pal Match Up for February 2022

 

Another pen pal match up!

 

We are going to run things the same as the last couple of times. Please write a letter of introduction about yourself and send it to:

 

Wonder Pens Studio Shop

290 Gerrard Street East

Toronto, Ontario

M5A 2G4

Canada

 

We will mail your pen pal’s letter to you, and your letter to your pen pal, so you will both have each other’s information.

 

Please ensure your letter is received to us no later than February 19, 2022. Within Toronto, I have had incredible luck with letters being received within 2 days of putting them into the mailbox! The postal system is truly miraculous. You will still have a bit of a grace period after February 19tth, as I will only begin matching and then sending out the matches in the couple of weeks after that. If there are other stragglers, I will match those together.

 

Please include:

• Your address: Please, please include your address at the top of your letter, as opposed to only on the outside of your envelope, or as a little slip of extra paper that could possibly flutter to the floor, slip through the floor vent, never to be found again like some lover’s secret or army code in a bad movie montage.
• An introduction with what you feel is interesting about yourself. Some people like to be cryptic or vague, leaving it up to fate to see who you get matched up with, and you are free to do this, but I strongly encourage you to write at least a few details, not only because it will help me with the matching, but it will also give your pen pal a chance to hit the ground running.
• If you have participated in pen pal match ups through our shop before, it would be extremely helpful if you could include, on a separate sheet, the names and cities of the people you’ve already been matched up with.
• If you have any private or personal information you’d like me to take into consideration, please include it on a separate sheet as well. Bearing in mind that there is some element of fate when it comes to matches like this, my number one and only goal is to help people find pen pals with whom they can write and receive as many letters as they’d like.

 

 

Please remember:

• I will try my best to check that everyone has included their address, and sometimes I will tear off the address from the envelope to include with the letter. This is always dangerous because…
• I will keep the envelopes in pairs for about a month, and then destroy them. If your pen pal introduction letter has no address, please contact me immediately and I will do my best to locate the envelope. If you are worried about the legibility of your pen pal’s address, please contact me.
• There is a chance that your pen pal will not write you back. I’m really sorry about this, but there is nothing I can do about this. I cannot post about it on the IG stories, to see if they’re still interested, I cannot look through our Wonder Pens customer list to see if anything matches. I generally recommend writing another letter, in case the first one got lost, but I actually think it’s quite rare for mail to get lost. Perhaps they were busy, and the second letter is a reminder, which is possibly the best case scenario. Other situations include poor health, family situations, job situations, etc and perhaps when they first entered the pen pal match up they had every intention of participating honourably, and then life happened. If you choose not to join up this time around because you had bad luck last time, I completely understand.
• It is very rare for us to have enough young people to match together, which I try to do based on age and gender. If you’d like your child to enter, I welcome it, and if I do have a good match, I’ll send them off, but typically we get very few children, so please bear this in mind.
• I am not accepting any entries by email.

 

***

 

It’s all the same as usual, and I feel like in general it goes quite smoothly, and I’m always so pleased by how many people enter (usually several hundred) and how enthusiastic they all are. Widowers, midwives, retired engineers, dog people, librarians, francophones, teachers, ballpoint users, Australians—it takes all sorts to make a world, and how ponderous that so many have found our tiny little shop tucked away. Selling fountain pens! Writing letters!

 

We are keeping warm in this cold spell. The other day both kids ate their entire lunches that I prepared for them, and the shock and rarity of that event must make it some sort of omen, though for good or evil yet to be decided. Two empty plates on the kitchen table is a foreboding that I was not prepared for.

 

We continue to be grateful for your support as we march on through the frostiness of these January days. New things coming into the shop everyday, it seems, boxes and boxes lined up ready to be cut open and sorted out. We seem to have received a particular large number of books, perhaps a backlog of books back ordered from the before Christmas—both restocks and new books. This feels like the perfect time to hide away with my notebooks and pens and a new book or two.