Write Back When You Can
By Gailmarie Pahmeier
In sixth grade I had a pen pal. I found her in the classified section of an Archie comic book. She lived in California, loved Veronica. I lived in Missouri, loved Betty. We loved our dogs. She had a poodle named Miss Tessa; I had a terrier mix named Gigi. We loved water, stories of sunbathing while sipping iced tea on a hot day. Our missives were declarations of our being alive, of shared experience. We wrote throughout the school year, closing our letters with “Write back when you can!” This relationship, made wholly out of words, was a light in my life.
The summer after Sharon and I began our correspondence, my family had finally saved enough to visit Disneyland. I begged my parents to take me to meet Sharon. I was so insistent that they finally gave in, dreading a long drive home with a tearful child. So on our last day in California, we drove to Sharon’s in our Pontiac Tempest. When we pulled up in front of her house, her father’s Cadillac was parked next to her mother’s Lincoln. The lush acreage of her yard, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, enhanced the grandest house I’d ever seen. Miss Tessa’s doghouse seemed bigger than the bedroom I shared with sisters, and I realized that when Sharon was writing me while sunbathing, she was poolside, while I was on the cattailed bank of my grandmother’s pond. While my family waited in the car, parents flicking their cigarettes into the street, I made my way up the walk and into another universe.
The hourlong visit is now a blur, but I do remember Sharon’s canopy bed, her pink princess phone, how the maid served us finger sandwiches, cream cheese and cucumber. As my family made our way back East, I also remember eating hot dogs at each truck stop. I wanted to be home, back where only story mattered, where two girls could just be girls, sharing tender secrets like sisters without thought of class, of concrete geography, of otherness. We continued to write for a couple months, but then, nothing. Junior high happened. The world tilted.
Did those letters to Sharon lead me to poetry? To search for communion in oppositional landscapes? Probably not. Maybe so. I’m not sure of anything like that. What I am sure of is that poems are a sort of letter, and letters can be a sort of poetry. When something needs saying, there is most certainly someone who needs to hear it.
I want to encourage all Nevadans to say what they need to say to someone who needs to hear. Please consider submitting a letter poem to the Nevada Poetry Project, Nevadan to Nevadan: What I Need to Tell You. Submission guidelines, sample poems, and our current galleries of submissions can be found by visiting the Nevada Poetry Project at nvartscouncil.org/nevada-poetry-project.
We’re all waiting to hear from you. And Sharon, if you’re out there and read this, write back when you can.
Photo courtesy of Gailmarie Pahmeier.
Gailmarie Pahmeier’s most recent book of poetry is Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints: A Nevada Gospel (WSC Press, 2020). She currently serves as Nevada’s Poet Laureate and is a 2022 Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets.