1 Sealed Letter

Kathryn Hastings
  • 5.0 (23)
  • History
  • Updated Bimonthly

The legacy of letter writing and how to bring this beautiful art form into the 21st century

  1. 5d ago

    The Residue of Attention with Jessica Oreck from the Office of Collecting & Design

    What makes an object worth keeping? In this episode, Kathryn sits down with artist, filmmaker, and collector Jessica Oreck, founder of the Office of Collecting & Design, a traveling museum devoted to the diminutive, the forgotten, the misplaced, and the unusual. Together they explore the hidden lives of objects, the memories they awaken, and why the seemingly insignificant artifacts of everyday life often become the most meaningful. Their conversation wanders through collecting, letters, museums, Virginia Woolf, Proust, the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the beauty of impermanence, and the surprising importance of leisure, wonder, and attention. They discuss: • Why ordinary objects often outlast precious ones
• The "residue of attention" and how use creates meaning
• How collections become portals to memory
• The relationship between beauty, grief, and impermanence
• Why women, artists, and dreamers need spaces of their own
• The value of everyday rituals and beautiful objects
• The enduring magic of the postal service and correspondence
• What it means to create a legacy in an age of infinite content This is a conversation for collectors, letter writers, artists, nostalgists, and anyone who has ever kept a small treasure simply because it felt impossible to throw away. SHOW NOTES Office of Collecting & Design:
https://officeofcollecting.com/about Museum Tour Dates:
https://officeofcollecting.com/tour-dates Treasure Club:
https://officeofcollecting.com/subscribe/treasure-club Decoder Club:
https://officeofcollecting.com/subscribe/decoderclub Office of Collecting & Design Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/office.of.collecting/

    53 min

  2. Apr 15

    117. Millennial Inheritance, Nick Fox on the Great Transfer of Clutter

    What happens when inheritance is not money, but cabinets, goblets, figurines, yearbooks, mystery boxes, and a thousand emotionally loaded objects no one quite knows what to do with? In this episode, Kathryn sits down with Nick Fox, creator of the wildly resonant Millennial Inheritance series, to talk about the strange, funny, tender, and sometimes overwhelming reality of inheriting other people’s things. Nick shares how a spontaneous video about sorting through family clutter became a rapidly growing community where people process grief, guilt, responsibility, memory, and the sheer weight of accumulation. Together, they discuss the emotional complexity of “inheritance” that was never intentionally passed down, the conversations families are not having before death, Swedish death cleaning, museum donation myths, collecting, sentimentality, and what it means to keep one meaningful object without being buried by the rest. This is a conversation about clutter, but also the stories we leave behind. Follow Nick and explore Millennial Inheritance here: Instagram: @nickfoxradio YouTube: @NickFoxRadio Facebook: Nick Fox Radio X: @NickFoxRadio

    44 min

  3. Apr 8

    116: The Sunday Letter Project with Rebecca McMillan

    In this episode, I’m joined by Rebecca McMillan, illustrator, mother, and co-founder of Wildflower Illustration Co., as well as the creator of The Sunday Letter Project. What began as a simple idea, to write one letter each Sunday, has become something much larger. A quiet movement rooted in presence, memory, and the belief that a handwritten letter still holds the power to change a day, and perhaps even a life. We speak about the letters that shape us early on, the way handwriting carries something of the soul, and what has been lost, and can be found again, in a world that moves increasingly fast and digital. There is something here about family, about creativity without pressure, and about the small rituals that gently return us to ourselves. This conversation is an invitation to slow down, to notice, and to write what we might otherwise leave unsaid. If you feel called, you can take part in The Sunday Letter Project here: https://www.thesundayletterproject.com/ Explore their shop: https://wildflowerillustrationco.com/collections/tslp-all Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesundayletterproject/ https://www.instagram.com/wildflowerillustrationco/

    31 min

  4. Apr 1

    115: Emma Hamilton: The Life They Dimmed

    Who was Lady Emma Hamilton before she was reduced to a scandal? In this episode of One Sealed Letter, I return to the archive to reconstruct a life that has too often been simplified. Emma Hamilton was not merely the companion of Horatio Nelson, but a woman who rose from obscurity to become an artist, performer, and politically influential figure within the Neapolitan court. 👉 The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton Available via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15469 📚 Sources & Further Reading This episode draws on: • Royal Museums Greenwich archives and biographical research • Primary correspondence between Emma Hamilton and Nelson (1814 edition) • Contemporary accounts, including William Beatty’s narrative of Nelson’s death ✨ Highly Recommended For modern scholarship, I highly recommend: 👉 England’s Mistress by Kate Williams

    37 min

  5. Mar 11

    114: The Punctuation That Almost Was: Lost Symbols of Tone, Irony, and Emotion

    What if English had a punctuation mark for sarcasm? Or a symbol specifically for rhetorical questions? Or even a mark that meant love? For centuries, writers, printers, and philosophers have tried to solve a quiet problem in language: written words struggle to convey tone. In speech we have inflection, pacing, and expression. On the page we have only letters and a handful of punctuation marks. That gap has inspired generations of thinkers to invent entirely new symbols for irony, disbelief, affection, and astonishment. In this episode, we explore the strange history of modern punctuation that was proposed but never adopted. We also explore how ton incorporate these interesting symbols into your writing. ⸻ Sources Bazin, Hervé. Plumons l’Oiseau (1966). Denham, Henry. Early typographic proposals for rhetorical punctuation (1580s). Speckter, Martin K. “Making a Point, or What’s the Story with the Interrobang?” TYPEtalks Magazine, 1962. Parkes, Malcolm B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press, 1992. Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. London, 1668. Unicode Consortium. Unicode Character Database and historical punctuation documentation. Smith, Keith Houston. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Houston, Keith. Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and Other Typographical Curiosities. Profile Books, 2013.

    30 min

  6. 12/26/2025

    113. Dicken’s Violated Letter

    In 1858, Charles Dickens wrote a private letter explaining the collapse of his marriage. It was meant to be shown, not published. Within months, it appeared in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. This episode tells the story of that letter and what followed. The full text is read aloud, then placed in historical context alongside Dickens’s public statement, contemporary press reactions, and what later emerged about the lives of Catherine Dickens and Ellen Ternan. This is not a verdict. It is an inquiry into how letters shape power, silence, and legacy, and what happens when private words outlive the people who wrote them. ⸻ Sources • Charles Dickens, letter to Arthur Smith, 25 May 1858 (“The Violated Letter”) • Charles Dickens, “Personal,” Household Words and The Times, June 1858 • Contemporary newspaper coverage, August–September 1858 • Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman • Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens • Patrick Leary, “How the Dickens Scandal Went Viral,” The Victorian Web • Charles Dickens Museum, Catherine Dickens correspondence

    26 min

  7. 11/05/2025

    112. “My Soul, Not Just a Mother” – Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Art of Being Overwhelmed

    In this episode, we explore the life and letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), one of the first women to paint herself nude and a pioneer of early Expressionism. Through her correspondence, Paula offers a rare, unfiltered window into the emotional world of a woman artist caught between creativity, duty, and selfhood. This episode centers on one of Paula’s 1907 letters written while she was pregnant, a raw and revealing piece in which she pleads with her sister to stop calling her impending childbirth a “blessed event.” Tired of being defined only by motherhood, Paula confides her fear of losing her identity as an artist and admits, “I have worked so little.” We reflect on how Paula’s exhaustion, honesty, and fierce self-belief echo the struggles many still face today: the tension between personal purpose and societal roles, between ambition and expectation. Through historical context and Paula’s own words, this episode offers a meditation on identity, overwhelm, and the timeless courage to believe in oneself. Full Letter Featured: Letter from Paula Modersohn-Becker to her sister (Worpswede, 1907), translated from German. Primary Sources and References: ​ Bachrach, Susan. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Biography. Fembio. https://www.fembio.org​ The Art Story Foundation. “Paula Modersohn-Becker Artist Overview and Analysis.” https://www.theartstory.org/artist/modersohn-becker-paula​ Musée d’Orsay. “Women Painters in the 19th Century.” https://www.musee-orsay.fr​ Radycki, Diane. Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist. Yale University Press, 2013.​ Modersohn-Becker, Paula. Letters and Journals. Translated by J. A. Underwood, 1960.

    34 min

  8. 10/15/2025

    111. A New Lease on Life: Dostoevsky’s Letter from the Edge of Death

    In this episode of One Sealed Letter, we travel back to December 22, 1849, when the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky stood blindfolded before a firing squad. Moments before the command to fire, a messenger arrived with a pardon from Tsar Nicholas I. What followed was one of the most extraordinary letters ever written: a missive to his brother Mikhail, written just hours after Dostoevsky believed he was about to die. We’ll explore the backstory of his arrest and mock execution, then read the full text of the letter that begins, “Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness.” Through Dostoevsky’s words, we’ll reflect on how close encounters with death can reawaken our appreciation for beauty, simplicity, and time itself. Read the letter in full and other letters of Dostoevsky here: https://ia800506.us.archive.org/15/items/dostoevskyletter00dostuoft/dostoevskyletter00dostuoft.pdf Sources: • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to Mikhail Dostoevsky, December 22, 1849 (Old Style), translated in Lapham’s Quarterly (“Reborn Into a New Form”) • Walker Caplan, “On the Terrifying Hoax Execution That Haunted Dostoevsky’s Writing,” Literary Hub (2022) • Alex Christofi, “Reborn Into a New Form (1849),” The Public Domain Review • Spencer Baum, “Dostoevsky and the Firing Squad,” Medium

    1h 4m
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About

The legacy of letter writing and how to bring this beautiful art form into the 21st century

Information

  • Creator
    Kathryn Hastings
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    119
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kathryn Hastings
  • Show Website
    1 Sealed Letter