Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Love Lettering Project spreads joy across Toronto

The Love Lettering Project is a community arts project that asks its participants to write love letters about where they live. For the past 15 years, Canadian writer and arts educator Lindsay Zier-Vogel has been encouraging people all over the world to create anonymous love letters in envelopes marked “Love,” and hide them throughout their communities for strangers to find. The objective? To spread joy.

It all started in the summer of 2004, when Zier-Vogel and a friend spent an afternoon writing poems in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park. “We were writing love poems to the city while sitting in the park, and we would slip them into these little airmail envelopes and hide them on our walk home,” she recalls. “It wasn’t a project at that point, but I remember it being such a lovely afternoon!”

While attending grad school the following winter, Zier-Vogel spent a lot of time at Robarts Library. “It was a bit of a concrete monolith and not always inspiring for people like me, and I found it really depressing and hard to spend so much time there,” she says. “I started writing letters to books that I loved (or I thought needed love), and I hid them in the books. And all of a sudden, the entire library was really transformed for me.  Zier-Vogel found that “it was such a transformative experience” to see “a place I’d spent so much time in that wasn’t really a happy place for me, all of a sudden have all this potential — and all this potential joy — just waiting for others to find.”

The next summer saw Zier-Vogel writing more letters and distributing them across Toronto: “I would meet with some friends, and we would hide the letters together, and they thought it was so fun and cool,” she says. “I realized then that hiding the letter was also a big part of this project. It wasn’t just people finding them . . .. It was about finding a good spot to hide the letter.”

Over time, Zier-Vogel’s project gained popularity. By the time she had sent out a total of 500 letters, her work was getting noticed by local magazines. Now she began setting up booths at events and markets in Toronto. The twist? Here, she would ask other people to write the letters: “I was doing an event at Kensington Market one day, and a lot of the people I worked with were kids. Of course, their relationship to the city is different than my relationship to the city, so they would say they love the park or the toads (things that I would never consider part of my city),” she recalls. “I thought of how interesting it is that, even though we all live in the same place, we all have such different experiences of that place. And that’s when I started setting up tables at community events and festivals, and I would ask people to write love letters” — their own unique love letters — “ to their communities.”

Zier-Vogel has received positive feedback worldwide since starting The Love Lettering Project. She has travelled across Canada, the U.K. and America while hosting writing workshops. She has been featured in Toronto’s Word On The Street Festival literally every year, and she has also partnered with the Toronto Public Library system teaching an after-school creative writing program for children. The Love Lettering Project has also been featured in international media, including The Londonist, CBC TV’s The National, Global News, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and many more. It was even named one of the top 50 reasons to love Toronto by Toronto Life Magazine. 

Zier-Vogel is looking forward to publishing two (yes, two!) books in the next two years. Her first novel, Dear Street, is a Love Lettering Project-based picture book with Kids Can Press that will launch in 2021. Her second novel, Letters to Amelia, will be published in 2022. 

For a time, the COVID-19 pandemic has paused Zier-Vogel’s extensive travels,  but she continues to host free writing workshops for kids online. And she eagerly anticipates the time when it will once again be safe to travel: “I love doing workshops and touring. It’s so much fun, and I love getting to work with groups of people. But I also love learning new things about the cities I am travelling to, and seeing all of the sites is just really exciting for me!”

For more information on Zier-Vogel and the Love Lettering Project, visit her website or The Word On The Street Festival site for information on future events. Follow Zier-Vogel on Instagram here.

© Tamara von Estorff, SesayArts Magazine, 2020