Have Authors Write to Your Child With Letters for Kids

When you're a child, the concept of getting your own mail is pretty exciting – after all, who mails bills to kids? My son looks forward much more to his biweekly notes from his grandmother than he does to any e-mail. Now imagine how cool it would be for your kids to regularly get letters from authors.

Around the start of the year, the literary website The Rumpus launched a subscription service called Letters in the Mail, which promised a letter a week from a variety of authors, including site founder Stephen Elliott, Aimee Bender, Dave Eggers, and many more. It has been highly successful, drawing attention from the New York Times. Obviously, the writers don't customize letters for each subscriber – that way madness lies – but they write a letter, whether handwritten, typed, or in graphic form, which is then reproduced by the good folks at The Rumpus and mailed out. Many writers include a return address, in the event that readers want to write back. (For a related attempt to promote letter-writing, see Jenny Williams's post on "My Month of Writing Letters," a project also featured in that Times story.)

This month, The Rumpus is launching Letters for Kids, intended for children six and up. The description is promising:

You’ll get two letters a month written by middle-grade authors like Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler, Adam Rex, Kerry Madden, Natalie Standiford, Susan Patron, Rebecca Stead, Cecil Castelluci, and more.

Some of the letters will be illustrated. Some will be written by hand. It’s hard to say!

The subscription is $4.50/month for US residents, $9/month for international readers. You can pay monthly, or purchase an annual subscription at a slight discount. Cecil Castelluci, author of The Plain Janes, First Day on Earth, and The Year of the Beasts will be curating the letters.

If your child has bookish tendencies, or if you'd like to encourage the development of such tendencies, this is worth a look.