1 Sealed Letter

A tiny letter, hidden beneath a prisoner’s dentures, helped set a campaign in motion to free Oscar Slater, a German Jewish immigrant wrongly convicted of murder. In this conversation, author Margalit Fox tells the remarkable story of Slater’s imprisonment, the family letters that sustained him, and how Arthur Conan Doyle used the methods of Sherlock Holmes to challenge a grave miscarriage of justice.

We also talk about what letters reveal that official records can’t, Fox’s research for Conan Doyle for the Defense, and the very different challenge of writing The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, a woman who left almost no written record behind.

Margalit Fox:
https://margalitfox.com

Conan Doyle for the Defense:
https://margalitfox.com/books/conan-doyle-for-the-defense

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum:
PRH.com/MrsM
https://margalitfox.com/books/the-talented-mrs-mandelbaum

Book trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6S3o0pDYjw

What did Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë write in the days surrounding the publication of their most beloved novels, before they knew what those books would become?

In this episode of The One Sealed Letter, Kathryn Hastings explores the remarkable correspondence surrounding the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. From Austen's affectionate delight in her "own darling Child" to Brontë's solemn anticipation of the public's judgment, these letters offer an intimate glimpse into the private lives of two extraordinary writers at a moment of profound uncertainty.

Kathryn also reflects on the recent publication of her own book, The Handwritten Life.

A meditation on authorship and the uncertainty of sending something we love into the world, without knowing what it might become.

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.