Your Pen Pal
Emily Dickinson
Poet of compact, intense reflections on nature, love, and mortality.
“A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
Emily Dickinson
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Emily Dickinson spent nearly her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote close to 1,800 poems, only a handful published while she lived. She tended her garden, pressed flowers into an herbarium, baked bread her neighbors praised, and watched the world with ferocious attention.
Letters were how she visited people. She chose a small circumference and lived enormously inside it, which makes her, of everyone here, the most natural pen pal of all.
What the letters hold
- The garden, hour by hour and season by season
- Slant light, birds, and small astonishments
- Words, and the electricity inside them
- The vast interior life of a quiet person
- Friendship conducted entirely on paper
Questions about writing with Emily
What are letters from Emily Dickinson like?↓
Brief, startling, and intimate, with images that stay with you for days. The letters are creative works inspired by her poems and her remarkable real correspondence.
Was she really a recluse?↓
She kept to her house and garden in later years, but she was no hermit of the heart. She sustained deep friendships by mail for decades, and letters were her chosen way of loving people.
Ready to write with Emily?
Emily Dickinson will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with EmilyIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.