Letter Writing at Pemi

In many ways life at Pemi hearkens back to older eras, offering campers opportunities to engage in timeless boyhood rituals. Some of these traditional rites of passage carry on outside of Pemi just like they always have: hiking Mt. Washington, casting a line into the lake at twilight, waking up early to go birding, or sitting under a tree strumming a guitar. Others, like our morning polar bear dip, have always been fashionable at Pemi and are now gaining traction outside of camp. We were a good century ahead of the cold plunge trend! And then there are a couple facets of the Pemi experience that have all but disappeared in the rest of society and exist as near-revolutionary acts for our campers. Chief among these is spending a summer fully disconnected from technology and therefore corresponding with people outside our community via handwritten letters. It’s Pemi’s long-running practice of letter writing and the myriad benefits it continues to provide that we’ll look at today.

In the earliest days of camp, letter writing was simply an act of everyday life for our campers and staff. It was the dominant form of communication between family members, friends, and institutions. As such, campers needed no assistance and (maybe) minimal prompting when it came to writing home each week. Every boy would have arrived at Pemi already regularly in the habit of writing letters, or at least deeply familiar with the idea of doing so on a near-daily basis. With the rise of telephones that started to shift, but even through the end of the millennium, campers would still show up having sent plenty of thank you notes, birthday cards, and maybe even the occasional full-on letter to a grandparent. By the 2010s that was no longer the case.

Whereas previously our boys would all have learned the crucial elements of letter writing – proper salutations and sign offs, addressing an envelope, where to put the stamp, etc. – it’s now much more the exception than the norm for our youngest campers to be familiar with these skills. And yes, second nature as they might be to many of us, they are indeed learned skills. Not to mention the fact that those elements only deal with the how of letter writing. They’re of no help in shaping the actual content.

Yet at Pemi, we still insist that boys write a letter home at least once a week, and we encourage them to write additional letters as well, whether to home or elsewhere. Why bother? On the most basic level, we of course want to ensure that campers and families remain in touch throughout the summer. Letter writing remains the most tried and true (and essentially only) way of communicating in a no-tech fashion across distance. Beyond the basic aim of allowing for communication, however, letter writing offers a number of additional benefits.

Unlike a conversation, letter writing requires one to slow down their thinking and carefully consider what’s worth including. Instead of running through a laundry list of everything that’s happened to them, campers have to reflect on their day or week and come to a decision about what merits inclusion in a letter. Additionally, research clearly demonstrates that writing by hand helps information stick better in the brain compared to typing. By having to think about what’s most important to them and then writing out events from their summer, campers actually increase the likelihood that they’ll remember those stories for months, years, or a lifetime.

A more hidden benefit of letter writing comes in the inherent slowness of the medium. Many Pemi-aged boys have grown up reliant on their parents to step in and help them solve problems or navigate challenges. We know that a Pemi summer dramatically helps increase a boy’s independence, and letter writing can actually play a key role in this process. Often times campers will include mention of a recent struggle in a letter home, perhaps a disagreement with a friend or disappointment about not having gotten into a first-choice activity on their first attempt. This instinct to seek help from home is only natural, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. Post Office feels a sense of urgency. It may be a few days before that letter reaches home and a few more after that before a reply hits the camper’s Pemi mailbox. What’s almost always happened in those intervening days is that the boy’s found another way to address the problem. Perhaps he advocated for himself and shared his feelings with a friend, or maybe he sought out the immediate resources at hand such as his counselor or an older camper. Even more frequently he’s simply left the seemingly urgent problem behind him, and it’s now a distant memory that’s been replaced by a succession of highlights.

As mentioned above, however, campers don’t necessarily know how to even think about what to include in a letter. What details should they mention? Should they talk about general aspects of their summer or specific events? Do they name names? Should it all be rose-tinted, or do they mention that thing that bummed them out today? To help with this, we’ve actually created a number of Pemi letter templates. We hand them out weekly to cabin counselors ahead of letter writing, always have extras on hand in the office, and they can even be printed and discussed at home before heading off to camp. For those so inclined, we have templates that encourage drawing a picture as part of the missive. The templates are a great way to introduce boys to letter writing, and we’ve crafted them to fit our full range of ages. Campers find them very helpful, and parents report they’ve increased the level of detail that boys include.

If you’re a parent reading this and starting to think, “that’s nice you’ve got resources for my son, but I haven’t written a letter in decades,” rest assured we’ve got you covered! Our parent communication page includes a whole section on helpful tips for how to write to your camper and support his growing independence. Letter writing may be brand new for your son and a throwback (or brand new!) for you, but with any luck it will be the start of a lifelong habit. It’s a cherished Pemi tradition, and no matter the technological changes that keep coming our way, letter writing isn’t going anywhere. You may wonder if AI wrote this for me, but you’ll know that your son’s letters this summer were 100% his own words!