Bi-Monthly By Ryan #24

Dear Comrades,

Letter writing is very important to me. I practice letter writing as a spiritual practice. I named my premiere and signature letter writing course after my practice: Letter Writing as a Spiritual Practice with Ryan Jafar Artes.

I use letter writing as a way into conversation with myself, and others who are inaccessible to me. I talk about my activism, political strategies, and whatever else I may need to discuss with myself because my ideas, philosophies, and theories have always been more radical than those around me. I write letters to James Baldwin for the sake of having politicized, formal, and casual conversations with an/my/the icon, who is otherwise inaccessible to me.

Letter writing allows me to be in a very particular kind of dialogue with myself. I can engage with myself more deeply via letter writing than I am able to do by thought alone. I write letters to myself, and save them to open at later times, both intentional and intuitive.

I wrote a letter to myself every day while I was away. As a self-assigned task, having to do so was a great way to process, record, and reflect on each day. Including mementos in the envelopes made each one such a pleasure to open, and also allowed me to clear my bag each day, for collecting delights on the next.

I opened some of the fuller and heavier envelopes immediately upon returning home and receiving them. I saved most of them to open at a later time, without a particular plan in place of when to do so. As I started to pack for the second annual conference, I realized opening my letters now would be a great way to help me mentally prepare to attend the event.

I am currently reading letters I wrote to myself last year while I was attending the first annual BIPOC Adoptees Conference in Portland, OR. I wrote them as a grounding practice while I was traveling. I filled the envelopes with stickers and other mailable mementos.

Between the two paragraphs I share above, I took time to explain my day in great detail to myself. My day felt very important, and still does when I read about it. It was a day worthy of recording in this letter to and from myself.

The letter is pictured above. It includes three cards. The message spills over onto the envelope of the third card, which I chose because I needed more space to write my message to myself.

I started writing myself letters early this year. As I pack and prepare, I have been writing letters to my hosts during my upcoming travels. I have also been writing letters to myself, as a preventative act of care, and also to create and manufacture a sense of arrival for myself.

In Solidarity, Ryan <3

linktr.ee/ryanartes

Ongoing:

• Please contribute to my GoFundMe campaign if you can afford to do so. The campaign will be running until the end of the summer at which point it will close. Please stay tuned for an in depth update in a future newsletter, thank you! <3

• The next session of The Adoptee Open Mic is on Monday, September 1, 2025 at 7pm EST. I am taking the month of August off for an intentional vacation and time for rest. Sign up here to get access to the link to join. <3

• I am teaching the third run of Letters to Our Homes, a generative letter writing workshop for BIPOC adoptees, this fall. See Bi-Monthly By Ryan #20 for my most up to date course flyer. I will devote an entire newsletter to Letters to Our Homes in the future. <3

• Check out my poem on The Quarry, A Social Justice Poetry Database curated by Split This Rock. I was nervous about recording myself reading my work. My nerves almost got the best of me, but I got a good recording after only 12 takes. <3