Post Quarantine
At the end of last year, we had a catch up with Post Quarantine to learn more about their project and their Reasons to be Cheerful. Read the interview below.
Hello! Please could you introduce yourself and your project?
We’re a team of four: Nikky Lyle, Claire Medcalf, Em Williams and Bianca Matley. Only a couple of us knew each other pre-pandemic but now we catch up at least once a week to run our side-project: Post Quarantine – letters to open when this is all over.
Post Quarantine is very much a product of the coronavirus situation. It’s an invitation to write to your future self — take time out, reflect on how you’re feeling right now, and look forward to better days beyond COVID-19. It’s open to everyone, a chance to get creative and a way of capturing how we’re feeling through this strange, separate yet shared, experience.
What inspired you to start the project?
Sadly, the inspiration to start the project came from one of the team losing a close friend to suicide back in March. We started Post Quarantine as a way to help people look after their mental health while in lockdown, isolated from their friends and support system. Writing a letter to your future self allows you to process everything that is (or not) happening, and how you’re feeling. As well as enabling you to look ahead with optimism. The pandemic has been tough on all of us. Writing is one of the most helpful things you can do during a time of stress. The slower pace of putting pen to paper allows you to order your thoughts and find some clarity.
What's been the best thing to come out of the project for you?
As a team, it’s given us something to focus on when everything around has, for want of a better phrase, gone to shit. Between us we’ve experienced being furloughed, cancelled contracts, redundancy, bereavement, relocation, and the struggle of keeping small businesses going throughout it all. Post Quarantine has been a positive constant during this turbulent time. Setting up and running Post Quarantine has fostered genuine friendship and a source of unwavering support.
As a project, receiving all these letters and sharing them on Instagram allows everyone to get some perspective. A quote Nikky likes to use sums it up perfectly – ‘we’re not in the same boat but we’re all weathering the same storm’.
Another highlight is the community it’s created. We hold writing sessions on Zoom to help schedule time to write these letters. We’re always amazed how lovely and restorative these meet ups are – so calm, caring and reassuring. Post Quarantine has managed to attract such a lovely bunch.
Do you have any hopes for how you may continue the project over the next few months? How do you think it might change as we go into 2021?
Maybe we’re not needed quite as much as we were in the first lockdown back in March, but as long as people want to write letters we’ll be here.
As we’re coming to the end of the year, people seem to be ready to draw a line under 2020 and look forward to 2021. So we might see some resolutions letters land in our post bag over the next few weeks, but who knows.
We’ve said from the start that we plan to reunite all our letter-writers with their letters at an exhibition party at some point, so hopefully we can start planning that in 2021. And we’d love to see the letters archived somehow, they’re such a unique record of this time. So if anyone wants to give us a book deal, let’s chat.
What are your Reasons to be Cheerful?
Receiving handwritten mail (nothing beats it)
Beautiful stationery
Building genuine friendships through Zoom
At the end of every month we collate a RTBC playlist. Could you give us your top 3 songs that make you smile?
We couldn’t cut it down to three, between us we have:
Proud Mary – Ike & Tina Turner
Seasons (Waiting on You) – Future Islands
Inspector Norse – Tod Terje
We Found Love – Rihanna & Calvin Harris
Moon River – Frank Ocean
And anything by Prince
The Post Quarantine teams top tracks will be collated into our January playlist, which will be up on the blog at the end of the month. You can find out more about the project and get involved here.