Postcards of Place

The Idea

A few years ago, I was driving down the road, travelling between home in PA and school in SC.  I had been living out of state for a while, and during that time I had begun sending postcards to friends and family.  I would send batches of postcards from places around school home to family and friends in PA, and then when I traveled home, I would send postcards from places around home to my new friends down south.  Then I would travel to conferences or on vacation, and I would send postcards to everyone.

I like postcards because they are simple and fun, but also real and meaningful. My friends and family all have mobile phones and internet, but I like making a point of communicating in a tangible medium. I appreciated that they would be holding something in their hands that I had held just a few days earlier.   I wanted folks in PA to see the postcards of the city I was now living in, and I wanted folks in SC to see places I visited when I was home. The postcards I sent were always informative about some place I knew or had visited and I appreciated that the postcards celebrated the places I was visiting.

During this drive, I heard this story about a writer who will put a 300-word story about your life on a postcard.  I had also recently become more aware of the Postsecret blog. As interesting as these forums are, I did not think they celebrated postcards as postcards.  They do not value postcards in the way that I do.

So after some thought, I came up with the idea for Postcards of Place. A place to share postcards with anyone on the internet.  A place where postcards are celebrated for how they can communicate an experience of a place in a personal way.  While the audience may not hold the postcards that appear on this blog, you can see that the card is a tangible thing which has moved across places. Hopefully, this blog will inspire others to share their places, whether its their hometown or some distant destination, both with the blog, and with their friends and family as well.