What if your whole class wrote annonymous poems and spread the love by leaving their letters all over the neighbourhood. Watch the CBC news story called Spreading the Love which describes Lindsay Zier-vogel’s love lettering project from last summer in Toronto and see if your class might be inspired to do a similar project. Here’s a description of the project from the poet’s website:

The Love Lettering Project is a community arts project that brings love letters to strangers. Lindsay has been writing love poems, turning them intoone-of-a-kind paper and thread collages and slipping them into air mail envelopes marked ‘love’ for seven years.

For photos and Love Lettering Project events, click here!

There’s something so inherently special about receiving words of love folded up inside an envelope, a ritual that has been lost in our increasingly technological age. There’s often such a small window in which we write love letters, and with so much of our communication occurring over email or on Facebook or phones, good old-fashioned love letters are becoming extinct. The Love Lettering Project puts the love letter first and foremost.

Writer and artist Lindsay Zier-Vogel believes in the transformative capacity of even the smallest gesture. As the objective is to explore the process of transforming strangers’ relationship to public spaces through anonymous love letters, the love letters are unsigned (without a web address, or information about the project) and exist solely for those who discover them, creating an immediate intimacy.

Zier-Vogel has been papering North America with love letters for seven years, writing love poems that are turned into one-of-a-kind paper and thread collages and slipped them into airmail envelopes marked ‘love.’ She then distributes these love letters throughout the city – from cherry bins and phone booths to parked bikes and unsuspecting mailboxes.