“Viral Epistolary”: an on-line project of letter-writing and sharing during the pandemic

In Italy, we realized an online letter-writing and letter-sharing project during the first wave of lockdown. Called “Viral Epistolary” (VE), it collected more than 400 letters from all over the country. VE’s aims were to promote a space for sharing domestic isolation, physical distancing, and pandemic experiences by using the genre of the letter as a mediation, meaning-making, and auto/biographical tool. Thus, we will present an inter-disciplinary narrative analysis of both the collected texts and the overall projectual experience by merging our psychological, sociological and educational backgrounds. Firstly, we will move along two axes: the writing practice and the shaping of a narratable self at the interface of emotional, compressed space and time, and relational dimensions. Later, we will highlight how shared writing experiences can serve as a tool for communities’ restoring, curing and healing processes through times of different social crisis.