Flagstaff, Ariz., has become a tricky city to invest in a home in — it’s 1 of the 4-period mountain towns individuals flocked to in the course of the pandemic, wherever about a quarter of homes ended up already 2nd residences. Acknowledging the absence of very affordable alternatives and low stock, the city recently declared a housing unexpected emergency. This is the natural environment in which my lover and I made a decision to purchase a household. By the time our child boy was a several months previous, selling prices experienced spiked 30 per cent in a single yr and inventory experienced dropped. Right after our 1st 6 provides were being rejected, somebody advised we write a letter to the sellers to stand out from the crowd.

I understood this sort of letters were being controversial, element of a hidden curriculum known only to some. But as a author, I saw them as a way to achieve purchase in an otherwise difficult current market. Soon after all, most every little thing I’ve at any time wanted — work, higher education admission, publishing a tale — I’ve attained by composing letters to strangers. House-give letters are the most vexed correspondences I’ve written, while. Per the 1968 Good Housing Act, they must not disclose individual data that may allow for a seller to discriminate in opposition to somebody centered on protected attributes these types of as religion, race or familial position. So structural constraints experienced yielded a new creating prompt: to explain this sort of a personal need with out revealing something about myself.

At the beginning of our lookup, my associate and I experienced enjoyment composing these letters. We started to study the households we toured for clues beneath the stagecraft — what the vendor experienced beloved, what they would miss out on most. Dear stranger, we like the way gentle from your kitchen area glows at dusk. Expensive stranger, the maple tree by your mailbox can make us content. Expensive stranger, we enjoy your tree swing, the odor of wooden smoke, the basketball still left in the yard. The other day, the seem of your garage doorway closing as we passed broke my heart. Narrating what we favored about a house helped us much more fully imagine a existence there: what we’d do with a fireplace, or a sunroom, or the weirdly ubiquitous pergola in the yard. We ended up inventing our potential, room by area.

Like fiction, these letters seek connection with a reader, devoid of self-disclosure. I am attempting to present, in the caliber of my awareness, that I will honor what was cherished, so that the sellers could wander by years from now and however identify the peach tree they planted, their initials in the concrete. But this isn’t fiction it is organization. Months went by, and the rejections stacked up. Regardless of what vocational positive aspects I imagined I appreciated ended up proving slim. Sincerity seemed no match for money. Not this 12 months, not in late capitalism. I ought to know this by now.

What I did not know is that fulfilling the need to have for shelter could possibly hinge on petitioning strangers by using a type I initial recognized as art. But in an economic system that will make attaining simple wants unattainable for so lots of, it’s possible composing letters to strangers — whether or not in making an attempt to get do the job, or publish my creating, or acquire a home — was a reassertion of selfhood, a bulwark against capitalism’s cruelty.

Like fiction, these letters search for relationship with a reader, devoid of self-disclosure.

I started pondering of myself as a author in my early 20s. Though I was brushing up in opposition to my regular overdraft limit and dwelling off barista ideas, everything I desired was sure up in creating. Possibly this belief in writing as a contacting was stoked by Wallace Stegner’s “To a Young Author.” Posted in The Atlantic in 1959, the letter to a previous college student arrived in my lifestyle like a indicator or permission slip. I printed it out at function and tacked it to each individual cubicle wall and corkboard I have stared at because.

Though the college student has penned Stegner for advice on “some purely sensible matters” (Does she need an agent?), Stegner responds with something much more: an assurance that her several hours and yrs of composing have not passed in vain. When I came throughout the letter, I felt the uncanny perception that Stegner was crafting straight to me. This uncanniness deepened when, yrs later on, I grew to become a Stegner fellow at Stanford and researched producing beneath his aegis.

But I’m more mature now, and I know it is not plenty of to become the very good stranger, the wanting get together who can produce superbly about an open up flooring strategy. Just about every two times I get a text reminding me of this: “Hi Im Lauren Im Searching to obtain 2 more attributes in PHOENIX I can obtain your prop AS IS so no repairs, deal with all fees and keep tenants if wanted. Need to I send additional depth?”

So this ought to be how it functions. “I would not blame you if you continue to requested,” Stegner writes, “ ‘Why hassle to make get hold of with kindred spirits you by no means see and may perhaps never ever listen to from, who most likely do not even exist besides in your hopes?’” But my composing profession has created me feel in the energy of terms to aid us imagine a livable future. In that sense, I was not producing to house owners so considerably as to myself. The letters haven’t aided us shut a offer, but the act of creating them has let us name a long run that has otherwise seemed foreclosed by circumstance.

Stegner warned me of the extended game. He reported the only viewers a single can at any time count on is a handful of strangers scattered all through the many years with whom your words will certainly land — these “kindred spirits.” Some component of me is however hoping to locate a kindred spirit on the other aspect of the negotiating desk, just one who will go through and say, “Yes, this is how it would be.” But I cannot publish about a home I haven’t found, just one that’s not for sale. With the season winding down and couple houses on the sector in this article, the letters happen generally in my brain now, on night walks with my son — pricey stranger, dear stranger.


Kate Petersen is a writer whose function has appeared in Tin Residence and New England Review. She performs at Northern Arizona University.

By Lela