1 Sealed Letter

What makes a love letter truly intimate?

In this episode of One Sealed Letter, Kathryn Hastings returns to one of the podcast’s most beloved subjects: how to write a love letter.

Inspired by her own wedding anniversary, the extraordinary marriage of Dolly Parton and Carl Dean, and a passage from a 1901 letter by Rainer Maria Rilke, Kathryn explores a different vision of romantic love. Perhaps the deepest intimacy is not found in becoming one, but in learning to love another person completely while allowing them to remain wholly themselves.

From the strange intimacy of correspondence to the importance of attention, specificity, memory, and vulnerability, this episode considers what our letters can say that ordinary conversation often cannot.

And, most importantly, how to put that love onto the page.

We are living through a huge shift in how humans communicate. But I don’t think technology is making the letter obsolete. I think it’s setting it free.

In this episode, I talk about what I’ve learned from reading hundreds of years of my family’s letters, why so much old correspondence is surprisingly mundane, and what that tells us about the future of letter writing. Letters no longer need to carry the maintenance of life. They can become something more spacious: a place for beauty, depth, contemplation, and the human hand.

This is the new frontier of letter writing, and we are shaping it now.

In this episode of The 1 Sealed Letter Podcast, Kathryn Hastings sits down with Alissa Boyer, mentor for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) and creator of Life by Alissa, for a conversation about sensitivity, intuition, self-trust, and learning to build a life that honors the way you actually experience the world.

Alissa shares her own path from a fast-paced career in the fashion industry to discovering that the anxiety and stress she was living with were taking a profound toll on her body. What began as a difficult period of digestive illness ultimately led her into meditation, emotional healing, spirituality, and a much deeper understanding of her own sensitivity.

Kathryn and Alissa explore what it means to stop treating sensitivity as a weakness, how we can distinguish intuition from anxiety, the importance of protecting our inner worlds, and the practices that help us return to ourselves. It’s a conversation about trusting your own experience and allowing sensitivity to become a source of strength rather than something you continually try to suppress.

About Alissa Boyer

Alissa Boyer is a mentor for Highly Sensitive People and the creator of Life by Alissa and Sensitive & Soulful. Originally from Minnesota, Alissa moved to California at 22 to pursue a career in fashion. After the stress of a demanding work environment contributed to serious digestive issues, she began exploring meditation, personal development, emotional healing, and spirituality.

That experience transformed not only her health, but the way she understood herself. Today, Alissa helps highly sensitive people better understand their sensitivity, strengthen their intuition and self-trust, and create lives that support their natural way of being.

Resources

Life by Alissa
https://lifebyalissa.com/

Sensitive & Soulful, Free Resources
https://www.sensitiveandsoulful.com/free-resources

Am I a Highly Sensitive Person? Quiz
https://www.sensitiveandsoulful.com/quiz

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/

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

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/

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

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.

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

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.