ABSTRACT
Dear friend: open the envelope, unfold the paper, read the words and take care.
My current creative practice explores letter-writing as an act of care. Words matter to us; words connect us, and we desperately need to find modes of connection in these precarious times. A regular practice of handwritten correspondences, across disciplines, geographies and generations, is my starting point for considering how feminist maternal relations of care and attunement in the present, and a willingness to listen to voices from the past, might help us to radically reorient our ways of relational being for the future. Through a hybrid format of critical essay, literary narrative and letter exchange, in this piece I propose that relations of care can transgress the borders of space and time through interpersonal written communication. Epistolary excerpts from intergenerational correspondences will be woven together with shared critical reflections on the ways that an ethics of care appears in writing across genres, from art criticism to theories of letter-writing, from Sara Ruddick to Donna Haraway, from Anthropocene feminism to models of care in feminist science fiction.
