Resources

Pen pal letter ideas

Thirty prompts for the next letter you'll write — pressed botanicals, book pairings, film-stock memories, and quiet questions. Bring them into a Bloom Exchange envelope, or keep them for your own correspondents.

Botanical observations

Small noticings from the garden, the sidewalk crack, the market bouquet. Perfect for the Bloom Exchange envelope.

  1. Press the first bloom you notice this week and tape it to the top of your letter.
  2. Describe the exact color of a petal without naming a common color word.
  3. Write about a plant your grandmother kept — its smell, its stubbornness, where it lived.
  4. Sketch three leaves you found on a walk and label the tree each came from.
  5. Trace a shadow of a flower onto your letter paper before you begin writing.
  6. Send a seed packet with instructions for planting it in your pen pal's window.

Book and film pairings

Slow media makes for slow correspondence. Trade recommendations that ask for time.

  1. Copy out a paragraph from a novel that made you stop reading and stare at the wall.
  2. Recommend a book by describing only its weather.
  3. Write about a film you loved as a child that you're afraid to rewatch.
  4. List five books you never finished — and why you might return to one.
  5. Include a bookmark you made from a magazine clipping.
  6. Share the last poem that made you cry, and tell your pen pal where you were sitting.

Analog memories

Photographs, film grain, and the objects we keep in drawers.

  1. Enclose a photocopy of an old family recipe card, stains and all.
  2. Describe a smell from your childhood kitchen in three sentences.
  3. Write about your favorite thrift-store find and what you think it once meant to someone.
  4. Send a strip of washi tape and tell the story of the last package you wrapped with it.
  5. Draw the floor plan of a house you no longer live in.
  6. Include a Polaroid — or a Polaroid-shaped rectangle of paper with a scene drawn on it.

Slow prompts

Questions that need more than a line. Answer one; leave the others for next month's letter.

  1. What is a small ritual you protect from other people?
  2. Which season do you most like receiving mail in, and why?
  3. Describe your handwriting the way you'd describe a stranger's.
  4. What is the last thing you saved a stamp for?
  5. Write about a piece of music that feels like a specific room.
  6. If your week were a still life, what three objects would it contain?

Correspondence rituals

Little practices that turn writing letters into an evening rather than a task.

  1. Make a playlist of six songs and write your letter start-to-finish while it plays.
  2. Light a candle before you begin; wax-seal the envelope when it burns out.
  3. Write the first paragraph with your non-dominant hand.
  4. Fold the letter into a shape — a fan, a boat, an envelope of its own.
  5. Enclose a used stamp you love and ask your pen pal to send one back.
  6. Address the envelope first, then let it sit on your desk for a day before writing.

Every Blooms and Bokeh parcel arrives with a journal prompt and a stamped envelope for a bloom exchange — a monthly excuse to write a letter.

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