At a little desk inside Richmond’s Hey June stationery shop and letterpress studio, you can put pen to paper and, with a little luck and a postage stamp, wind up with a pen pal in another corner of the world.
This summer, shop owner Maria Brown joined the Sunday Letter Project, an international network of stores known as “letter keepers” that helps people strike up handwritten correspondences.
Here’s how it works: A writer can send a general letter to any letter keeper in the network, where any number of customers can pick it up and write back. If two writers hit it off, they can keep the correspondence going by addressing future letters to each other, care of their respective letter keepers — no home addresses required.
The result is part community mailbox, part old-fashioned pen pal club. Since Hey June became one of nearly 50 participating locations in the United States, Brown said, letters have arrived from around the country and as far away as England and Australia. The project has also attracted letter writers of all ages to the Richmond shop, with some inspired by the recent epistolary novel The Correspondent.
Despite the name, the program isn’t limited to Sundays. People can stop in throughout the week to compose a note or check the mail.
Brown said part of the delight is the glimpse each letter offers into the writer behind it: the stationery they chose, the stamp on the envelope, the color of the ink, the loops and slants of their handwriting. That physicality makes a letter feel more personal than its digital counterpart.
For a shop devoted to paper and ink, it’s a fittingly analog way of “finding that humanity again,” as Brown put it.
The original print version of this article was headlined “SPECIAL DELIVERY”
This article appears in Performing Arts Preview • 2026.
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