“How are you?” is a hard question to answer right now. “How are you?” is something you might ask in a phone call or in a letter. But we found it’s more answerable in smaller chunks, like on a postcard.

 

For Issue 6, we decided to go with what felt like a relatively simple idea: send a “postcard” to someone else, sharing one thing from your life in the past few months, and get one back – knowing this format would carry potentially layered meanings during a global pandemic, democracy crisis, etc.

 

The Pool’s growth has always depended on intersecting circles of friends. The “postcard” exchange made sense as a way to harness and expand  that sense of community, especially during a time of deep isolation.We also hoped it would bring us back into the three-dimensional world, when, for many of us, interaction with the world is filtered through a screen.

 

Some pieces stand alone, or aren’t clearly addressed to someone.  Some would never fit onto an actual postcard, either. But this issue is as much about the concept of exchange, connection,  as it is about the content.  Maybe we haven’t responded to our friends’ texts in months, but we offered fragments of our lives to a friend-of-a-friend (of-a-friend…). Our postcards are a remembering, and perhaps a letting go. 

 

We hope you find something among them that stirs you and makes you feel less alone. It turns out sending mail was something of a radical act in 2020. May there be more postcards in 2021.