This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, —
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love to her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly to me!
This is My Letter to the World, Emily Dickinson
Near the end of Patti Smith’s 2025 memoir Bread of Angels, she recounts the altitude sickness she experienced the morning after arriving in Bogota, Colombia. She lies in her hotel room, receiving the care she needs in preparation for her performance. Emily Dickinson sits on her lap, a companion in her convalescence. “This is My Letter to the World” inspires her to write her own letter — a letter that weaves themes and images from her life into an outpouring to those beings and objects with which she has formed kinship. From that passage, she writes: “ … I am writing to the skater unobserved, on a pond of ice melting. I am writing to the sea, to veterans on parade once proud. To the smelt runs, to hot dogs by the lake, to marshmallows on a stick over the open fire. To skinned knees, flyswatters, skate keys, and a blue Pelikan ink overturned on a schoolgirl’s desk.”
She uses these callbacks in her writing to build rhythm in her memoir. We recognize the listing, the lyrical structure from her music. She is a natural storyteller, generous and loving as she describes the people she carries in her heart. The poetry of her writing moves the prose into a place that describes the process in which she remembers: “I dip my pen into a glass inkpot and scrawl these words: I am memory. I am a rabbit, a taxidermy cartoon falling through space. A block of silver burning the fingertips of a grasping child. I am a polished spinet played by the English grandmother who is no longer mine. I am her hand that fashioned lace, her fingers never touched, caressed, never felt. I am a knot of hair in my mother’s comb. I am ankles, wrists, legs, and arms too long. I am the green couch that opened as a bed. I am the lie that begat another, the blue cornflower, and daisies woven into wilting crowns …” The storyteller carries inside her memory as she reforms those flashes into meaning.
Our writers around Oregon have embarked on the ambitious work of reforming moments of their youth. Yeyin Chin at Oregon State Penitentiary proposed that we begin our youth outreach project by writing letters to our younger ourselves. The writers have taken this project to heart, working diligently to hone their pieces into testimony worthy of sharing with young people. There is the hope that someone will read a letter and feel a resonate in the belly. And in doing so, this helps them take comfort, feel less alone, understand that there is a way forward. Yes, a tall order.
We asked each of our writers to move a detail or a story from the place they were writing to create a short piece of memoir. We will publish letters and accompanying pieces in the coming months. This week, we are drawing from our archive of memoir to accompany each letter.
Yeyin: Letter to Younger Self
Young Me …
All your life, you have been looking for an answer. You feel that you are different from other people. You know that you think differently. The truth is that you are different. You have been given a hard life because you can handle it. You have no idea how strong you become inside. However, the hard stuff is just beginning.
Red Water by Yeyin Chin
It was calling out to me, daring me to jump over it and I was way too confident, knowing I could easily clear it — the fish tank was only two feet tall and I was a six-year-old big boy …
Stressla: Letter to Younger Self
Dear Young You:
I was sitting here thinking about that lie we were told by the older men that had our ears, saying to us that “men don’t cry.” Boy! was that a horrible thing for our young minds to believe. And from that one lie, the internal dislike of self was born.
Crossing the Boundaries to Draw Ancestral Lines
by Stressla Lynn Johnson
While I was young and adventurous, it never crossed my mind to violate these boundaries. I knew there was no way to go beyond my designated borders without being detected or even detained by an adult. I grew up in a time when every adult in the neighborhood knew what child belonged to what family.
As we start a new round of January workshops, Patti Smith’s letter and fragments of her memories will accompany us. Some of our best conversations start with poets. She says: “Everything that happens years before we are born sets the stage for our existence.” Opening ourselves up to the stories of how we came to be helps us understand the very way the stage was set when we arrived. We do not change the past, but our telling forms our future. | TDS