Lindsay Zier-Vogel wedged a letter, sealed in an old-fashioned airmail envelope, into the sand at Sunnyside Beach last Friday morning. She stuffed another letter into the hollow of a tree near the boardwalk and tied another to a No Lifeguard on Duty sign a few metres from the shore—this one was addressed to “the lake, where it looks like an ocean.”
It was the first day of “Love Lettering,” a labour-intensive annual art project that Zier-Vogel first undertook seven years ago simply because it seemed fun. Zier-Vogel, whose day job is writing for the So You Think You Can Dance Canada web site, canvassed her friends and family for things they love in Toronto, from the specific (the middle seat at the back of a double streetcar) to the general (trees). She wrote love poems for each and then cycled around town distributing them. This year is her most ambitious to date—she composed 65 poems, which will go out to 500 locations by the end of June.
Most of the letters are addressed to places or things in the west or east ends, with only a few stragglers intended for outlying areas. Zier-Vogel has one letter she’ll bring to an abandoned cemetery on a tiny plot of land between the 401 and the 427.
She wants the letters to be anonymous, with no contact information or explanation of the project. And it’s as ephemeral as can be. If the letter in the sand at the beach wasn’t found within a few hours, it probably just blew away. There’s no way for Zier-Vogel to know who’s received the letters, and what they’ll think.
Planting a letter addressed to “flowers” in a flowerpot outside a garden store on Roncesvalles, she reflected, “Maybe someone will find it and say, ‘Man, this is bullshit, this is crap. Love is for suckers!’ That’d be cool too.”
