Today, from our sister publication Art Practical, we bring you Jen Delos Reyes’s article from issue 8.3: Art can’t do anything if we don’t. Delos Reyes ruminates on the power of letter writing and the role letters have played in her personal and professional life. She ends this piece with the letter she would have sent to incoming art students, stating, “We need artists to understand social systems, political and legislative structures, to be skilled in non-violent protest and demonstration, and to understand how to organize creatively in their communities.” This article was originally published March 23, 2017.

I have been spending time recently reading the letters of influential Southern writer and activist Lillian Smith. I am working on a lecture for an upcoming symposium on arts and social change organized in her honor. Smith’s life work was dedicated to ending social and racial injustice. She did not see a division between art and politics and in her own life did not see the role of artist and activist as separate. Most people, she felt, are too quick to separate means and ends. In a letter that she wrote to an editor at the New York Herald Tribune, Lewis Gannett, she reflected on what the role of artists should be in a politically tumultuous, strained, and divisive America. “But of course there are times when we can take no more. We must have something to cheer us, to divert, amuse. But we should not ask our serious artists and novelists to be ‘good therapy’ for us; nor should we ask them to show us the ‘best America’—whatever that is. It isn’t fair to ask an artist to do anything but reveal to us human experience as he knows it; as he has felt it, dreamed it, experienced it.” Smith believed in the power of letters to affect change, and letter writing was part of her activism. Post-election, many of us have also been writing letters, mostly to our local representatives.

In 2015 I attended one of Fred Moten’s lectures at which he read several gorgeous, rich, and vulnerable emails he had written to his friends and colleagues. His words reminded me of how I want to communicate and how I want to reflect on what I encounter in my life. Inspired by his talk, I began a mostly weekly practice of writing letters to beloved friends scattered across the world. Letter writing is a form that I have come to embrace and use often for communication; the form lends itself to intimacy, to a kind of address that feels deep and direct.

From one of Moten’s poems:

the absence of your letter

shines in absent distance.

Read the full article here.