Portland Books Through Bars

On Wednesday, March 25th at 6pm, we will be opening up the next round of sign ups for our weekly volunteer letter matching sessions.

All sessions for April through June will be released at this time and you will be able to sign up for your first selections of the new year.

Because of how long our wait lists have been getting, we would like to ask you all that in the first day our sessions open for you to only pick TWO sessions per month to attend.

Our hope is that more of you, who have been patiently waiting, will then be able to attend one of our letter matching sessions before the next quarter is up.

After the first 24 hours have passed, then you’re welcome to sign up for as many sessions as you may like!

Want to get this reminder sent to you via email? Join our newsletter (no spam!) and hear about session drops a week in advance!

Artist and Board Member Uma has been creating an archive of artwork that has been sent to us over the years from people thanking us for the books they received in the mail.

We keep this artwork in a binder for people to browse and ask our volunteers to make sure to keep any letters they receive that have extra art included!

Uma is also the artist behind our logo and our hand drawn signage for our letter matching sessions and tabling events.

Pockets, you made our day!

We received this sweet letter and enclosed chapbook zines from an artist and poet in Birmingham, AL named Pockets.

If you ever have similar materials you would like to send our way to share with folks in our community, we love to open letters to these kinds of surprises 💌

Yesterday, we unpacked a stack of ‘return to sender’ envelopes, which isn’t an unusual thing for us to receive when one of our community members is moved to a new location or is released.

We got through the first 10 or so envelopes alerting us that the letters we sent during our Letters of Light event could not be delivered because that person was no longer at that specific institution.

And then we got to the “mail violations” 🙄

Each of the letters we sent through this campaign we photocopied making sure no ink or crayon or marker or anything would flag in the mail review system + writing “this is a copy” in the top corner of the page even before copying and sending.

Most of the 20+ “violations” circled a drop of rainwater on the edge of the external envelope that had barely leaked into the enclosed letter.

A drop that could have been easily transferred to the letter at the bottom of a mail carrier bag, bottom of a rusty mailbox, transferring mail from a bin to the mail delivery locations, you name it.

A couple of the rejections didn’t have the “violations” even make it through the envelope to the enclosed letter - so they decided our return address stamp was in violation instead drawing an arrow on the front of only SOME of the returns from the same institution.

Rainwater? In Oregon? During the winter? Groundbreaking.

We were immediately frustrated by this, especially after also reading many letter responses that came in yesterday as replies from Letters of Light, thanking our volunteers for helping our community “feel human again” and enclosing artwork and handmade bracelets.

We talk a lot about how we can’t control what gets flagged for rejection from the institutions and how much of it seems very subjective.

This painted that picture particularly clearly for us and we wanted to share with you the types of fiddly, opaque “guidances” we are trying to follow with every package we send.