When I first got email, we didn’t have the internet at home so I would write things out on looseleaf and take the pages in to town to send from the library computer. I was young and living in the country and it was summer which meant that the ride was dusty and everything else was green. The only person I emailed was my best friend in Scotland. Often the letters were long because I was having trouble sleeping. To pass the insomniac time I would crawl out my bedroom window and sit on the porch roof and hand-write email. Those letters were rich with exhaustion, and when I typed them in days later they seemed like things I would write, but things I would write if I were a different person, and I liked this estranging distance. The letters I liked the best were the ones that were so distant that they turned the library unreal. These were the letters written late late late in the evening, in the heaviest part of the evening, when the frogs were singing in the creek and all the air had settled thick on the trees and the roof was warm and I wrote instead of slept and the sky turned just this color.

Laura Yoder is an academic and designer who still prefers working it out on paper first.