For this signment, I liked the idea of working on a surface that had already been through some layers of meaningful mediation.

This envelope was sent to me this past summer by a friend of the family, a person with whom I’ve exchanged letters since childhood—she was perhaps my first epistolary correspondence and certainly one of my first writer-friends. She calligraphed my address onto it in this special form of beautiful inscription, and the envelope has also been marked by its handling in the mail. Some time later, she gave me my first calligraphy pen and the instructional book she had used to learn lettering when she was younger. In a multi-layered response, then, to the forms of meaningful inscription she has contributed to my life, I calligraphed a verse onto the back of this envelope that also became important to me last summer, four lines from the German poet Paul Celan.