San Francisco, California
December 11, 2000

Dear Readers,

The idea for my now-defunct zine, Other People’s Mail, came to me when I was living in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, working at a bakery, waiting to move, and taking lots of long afternoon walks after work with Lisa, my friend and co-worker. I started to collect some of the amusing, intriguing, and revolting debris we found on the sidewalks. Working in a bakery and dealing with the public all day, I felt very connected with the rhythm of the day and the rhythm of the city. I spent a good part of my workday observing people in transit and was fascinated by the idea that any one of them could become a part of my life at any moment. The writings that I found on those walks – brief, often cryptic glimpses of other people’s lives – became souvenirs of the constant intersection and collision I felt all around me.

I began to gather all the puzzling ephemera that people come across in their public lives: lists found in the pockets of thrift-store clothes, notes passed in coffee shops or left on windshields, school work left in textbooks, postcards and photos from junk stores, letters left at bus stops, rants posted on power boxes, writings left in photocopiers, and so on.

Once I moved to Texas I found myself isolated with a lot of free time, so I started Other People’s Mail. Between the spring of 1995 and the fall of 1996 I published four issues of O.P.M. Each was 24 pages long and included a very random but hopefully rhythmic collection of anonymous writing, intended to be read in a single sitting. Collecting material for Other People’s Mail and sending the final product back to those who contributed gave me an opportunity to feel tangibly connected with the day-to-day life of the cities I’d left and the lives of my friends.

I’ve been an avid reader of Open Letters for a while now. I’d talked with Paul Tough a little in ’96. He had come across Other People’s Mail through mutual friends and had kind words to say about the zine and the concept. He later invited me to contribute something to themail-themed episode of This American Life. I ended up not participating, mostly because I’m not a fan of my recorded voice, and have since regretted it.

When I finally subscribed to Open Letters a few weeks ago, I wrote Paul a note to say hello and let him know that I’d been thinking about resurrecting O.P.M. He replied with the following:

I’m happy to hear you’re considering recuscitating the zine, but if you’re not quite ready to take that step, how about this idea: maybe you could guest-edit a week’s worth of Open Letters, and publish four or five selections from the (I’m sure vast) piles of mail that you’ve been saving. I think it could be a cool departure for us, and I hope fun for you.

We could even distribute the resulting weekly as a co-branded (yes I said co-branded) Open Letters/OPM issue.

What do you think? Do you have some good stuff saved up? Does that kind of collaboration interest you?

I was thrilled to have an opportunity to collaborate with Open Letters and a chance to explore how O.P.M. might work on the web. In the process of moving again, I’d become reacquainted with my vast stores of unused material and decided that if I was still committed to saving and collecting these scraps, I ought to be committed to doing something with them.

Today’s letter/poem came to me by way of my friend Wendy B., who obtained it from a worker at a copy store in NYC. Wendy B. is an Other People’s Mail all-star. Even though the zine has been defunct for more than four years, she has continued to send me gems from across town and across the country. She sent me this one a couple years ago with a note saying, “Abby – I’m starting to feel a little wacko cuz I’ve been sending you so much intra-city mail…but I keep finding such bad-ass stuff that you need to have.” And I must confess, I’ve sometimes felt a little imbalanced for needing to have it, for cherishing all this debris, stashing it, and shuffling it through three interstate moves.

The allure of the concept of Other People’s Mail for me is its universality. Nearly everyone has, at some point, left, littered, perused, or collected the type of communications that ended up in O.P.M. Perhaps you have a stash of this sort of thing yourself. This week I’ll share a sampling of mine. I hope that you find it to be easy reading.

Sincerely,

Abby Bridge