Youngna Park is the last person you'd expect to be concerned about the demise of the handwritten letter. She'd be too busy firing off a few dozen text messages a day, pinging friends on Gmail chat, dealing with as many as 100 e-mails daily and keeping up her popular blog at Youngna.com.
But lately she's felt something missing among her broad network of friends. "It's becoming harder and harder to write a long, meaningful message to people," said Ms. Park, 24. "An e-mail is so impermanent, so insignificant in many ways. How can 100 e-mails in your inbox feel in any way significant?"
Ms. Park's remedy: the Modern Letter Project. Participants receive the names and addresses of 12 "snail-mail pen pals," and over the course of a year they exchange letters with their fellow nostalgists.
Within a week, after she and fellow blogger Corie Trancho-Robie, 29, posted a call for letter writers on their blogs, they had more than 150 responses.
Once considered a death knell for the handwritten word, the Web is now host to a score of projects focused on keeping the craft alive.
One of the first was the 1000 Journals Project, started in 2000. One thousand journals were distributed among a group of people worldwide who signed up online, then each scribbled a note or added a picture before passing it on.
The Wandering Moleskin Project treads similar territory; notebooks are circulated among Web sign-ups, who write about anything from the weather ("Today's description: partly sunny, a bit overcast, about 40 in the valleys of Pennsylvania") to drink recipes ("By continuous addition of rum on to the burning cone using the spoon . . . the sugar was finally all molten"). They then scan their personal pages and send them to Moleskinerie.com, which tracks the progress of the books.
But Ms. Park and Ms. Trancho-Robie's undertaking is the first to focus solely on the waning art of letter writing.
Rebecca van de Graaf of Vancouver eagerly signed up after she read Ms. Trancho-Robie's post on Callalillie.com. As a creative writer, she often finds herself annoyed with the decidedly uncreative writing she does in an average day as a communications director.
"My e-mails have a tendency to be very short and to the point," said Ms. van de Graaf, 27. "I used to write letters a lot. I had pen pals all over the world from travelling who I kept in touch with. But that has all kind of died away. I keep in touch with a few who have Web access, but it's not quite the same."
Samara O'Shea, author of the new book For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing, argues that handwritten letters divulge more than e-mail ever will, through a combination of handwriting style, choice of stationery and even smell. "There's no opportunity for misinterpretation. With a computer screen, there is an emotional void," she said.
Still, Ms. Park and Ms. Trancho-Robie encountered their share of complications as they set out to rejuvenate an old craft among a thoroughly modern set.
Several sign-ups dropped out after realizing they would need to distribute their home addresses.
Another writer Googled the first name on her list and then reported back to Ms. Park and Ms. Trancho-Robie with what, to her, was a troubling discovery. "She found out that this person was a right-wing Republican and had posted inflammatory political statements online," Ms. Park said. "The writer said, 'How can I write a letter to this person knowing that their views are so different than mine?' "
There was also an overwhelming anxiety that struck many of the writers, most of whom dash off dozens of e-mails every day.
