Breshly News

“I am once again looking for a special woman to share my life with,” begins L-231; she follows with a list of desired qualities (incurably romantic, strong Christian values) and undesired ones (drug use, bisexuality). M-292 divides what she’s looking for into a list of likes (reading, correspondence, San Francisco) and dislikes (organized religion, people who make a career of being “politically correct,” anything wherein women is spelled womyn, the “slobby-dyke look—baggy pants, flapping vests, keyrings, etc.”). These are the ladies of The Wishing Well, and they are—unremittingly, very badly—looking for love.

The Wishing Well, named for the Radclyffe Hall novel The Well of Loneliness, was a print personals magazine, then called a “correspondence service,” founded by Pat Bartlett in 1974. Readers submitted anonymous self-descriptions that would be assigned a code number and listed alongside their locations, ages, zodiac signs, and, occasionally, images. I first came across the publication on a visit to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Like anyone, I want to find love in the way that lucky people find love (plane companion, chance encounter, misdirected package, sexy emergency respondent). But it’s difficult to sustain patience, and I recognized myself in the Wishing Well writers’ willful interjections with fate: their provocations, disclosures, disappointments, failures, and the interminable urgency of those who look for love. (How was it, I wondered as I flipped through the pages, always everyone’s last chance?)

Each visit to the archives commences with an orientation and tour. On my fifth trip, during introductions, a woman in violet steel glasses turned to me and said, “I’m here for you.”

“Me?”

“You’re the one who keeps emailing about The Wishing Well.”

She was Saskia, I realized—a coordinator who had recently denied my request to visit privately. The archives adhere to a strict calendar: group visiting hours are posted at the start of each month, and fill up quickly.

“I want to hear what you love about it,” she said as we climbed the mahogany steps of the brownstone that’s been the archives’ home since the nineties. We passed dispatches from the 1985 Butch-Femme Panel; unpublished poems by Adrienne Rich; biographical files, which include boxes of correspondence belonging to the cofounders and former partners Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle, a collection that culminates in a file dedicated to ephemera from their breakup. We skirted the lesbian pulp novels, the 1994 issue of Girlfriends featuring lesbian cops, the shelves of erotica, the buttons, the locks of hair. Eventually, we found ourselves in the upstairs parlor, in the periodicals collection, among green satin boxes of defunct newsletters, journals, and magazines, alphabetized on metal shelves. Saskia’s been involved in the archives since 1989, when they were still housed in Nestle’s Upper West Side apartment, and enjoys the renewed excitement conferred by its steady stream of visitors. She told me, “I always find new things.”

Except that day, we couldn’t find any copies of The Wishing Well. They weren’t among the W’s—where they’d been every other time—nor in the rest of the periodical collection, nor in the neighboring stacks of biography files, which we scoured, rebuking the Naughty Lesbian we suspected had misplaced them. I attempted to sustain interest in the search, quieting myself to the archives as I leafed and sought, and then, in a place we’d both looked countless times, this time there they were.

 

 

After a few years of publication, Bartlett brought aboard Laddie Hosler as a coeditor. By that point, The Wishing Well—a stapled stock-paper booklet—already had a thousand subscribers. Alongside personals, it featured poetry, abbreviation guides, illustrations, debates on bisexuality, word searches for phrases like wishful lover, apologies, ads for signature jewelry, book reviews, field reports from relevant events like the 1972 New Jersey Women’s Fair (“It was beautiful. So much information: childbirth alternatives, yoga, baking bread, rape!”), and more. The anonymous personals, divided into sections for singles and couples, constituted the bulk of each edition. Interested subscribers could respond to listings by code, and their letters would be routed via The Wishing Well’s California-based office to the intended recipients. Only when the writer and respondent chose to exchange addresses were they transformed into correspondents.

Typically, letters don’t become public until long after they’re sent. There’s a level of popular intrigue required to warrant a published collection, museum, or archival exhibition. But The Wishing Well inverted that progression: ordinary letters started as public listings and aspired toward private exchange. Subscribers’ bids for love were recorded, sealed, and postmarked, then—just as a coin, imbued with want, is kissed and cast out into a wishing well—the long course of conveyance began. Hands flew over sorting bins, cargo planes, and box trucks; the coin clattered down onto bedrock. Then the interlude, the pause for the intercession of the postal worker, editor, water deity.

 

 

It’s no surprise that the mail—a vast, invisible circulatory network that allows us to sidestep time and space, our foremost confinements—is so readily invested with the properties of the mystical. Early editions of The Wishing Well are adorned with illustrations that emphasize its divinatory quality. A nightgowned, nightcapped cartoon woman, standing before her blown-open door, raises her arms to rejoice in an abundance of letters: “THE WISHING WELL … IT WORKS!” attests the text beneath. Another—“WAITING A WANTING”—stands wistfully before her mailbox, anticipating the beloved she’s summoned.

“Everyone who writes a love letter becomes a woman,” Cathy Davidson writes in The Book of Love, which compiles over a hundred love letters, from Anaïs Nin to D. H. Lawrence to Henry James to Virginia Woolf, in an attempt to define the love letter’s ten essential features as a genre (the above is number eight). The seventh: “The cogito of the love letter is: ‘I write, therefore you are.’ ” The Wishing Well’s listings represent a similar sort of conjuring. They are not merely records of longing, but creative acts—invocations, calls into being. Becoming the beloved is the project of becoming the letter’s addressee.

 

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The Wishing Well contains chronicles of success and failure, of venturing forth, moving on, starting over. “Because of The Wishing Well I met Linda,” writes one subscriber. “We wrote, faltered, shared of ourselves and slowly fell in love. Me—a woman who didn’t want a wife or to relocate now lives in Anderson with my life-mate and happily commutes 38 miles to work in the city. Linda—self-labeled bisexual—left her man, not for a woman love but for Linda’s sake.” At a different station stands L-231: “Just recently I thought I had found the woman I wanted to share my life with and I temporarily discontinued my membership. Well, things did not work out.” And at still another waypoint are the humane, tentative tiptoes of 0-266: “I’ve been alone for six years now. I can’t stand the thought of too many more. I learned to live with just myself many years ago after the end of a 14 year relationship. I think I’m afraid sometimes of starting again. The first step is the worst … I think I’ve just taken it.” The archive is cluttered with such occasions: just as one person gives up, another sets out. Like the mail, the archive condenses periodicity. We find ourselves at all possible points of conveyance at once.

Like the archives’ founders, Pat Bartlett and Laddie Hosler were a real couple whose project outlived their romantic relationship. A fragmented record emerges through the partial run of accessible editions. In the summer of 1979, Pat penned a public letter about her decision to leave The Wishing Well to her ex. “Most of all, I will be leaving Laddie whom I have loved as I have loved The Wishing Well,” she wrote. Laddie also responded publicly: “I become aware of how much you have given me, perhaps the most precious part of you: The Wishing Well. People always delight me, they do now. But in their delightful presences, I am even more aware of your absence. Your absence is your presence.” In a third letter, written together, Pat and Laddie urged their readers not to be disheartened by the ending of their partnership. “Begin new relationships,” they encouraged.

And Laddie did. The August 1980 edition introduces a woman named Gloria Fudge—not only as an editor, but as Laddie’s wife. You can probably guess how they met.

 

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In the early aughts, a new technology arrived to The Wishing Well: email. I’ve found only one edition from this period, in which the phrase “Have E-mail” is universally appended to the formerly anonymous listings. With this addition, letters ceased to be material objects passed through the hands of postal workers and editors. In fact, there would no longer be any course of conveyance at all: no well to clang down, no interval between dispatch and delivery, no intercessory pause. The ladies had arrived at the age of global simultaneity.

During one of my expeditions to the archives—inspired by a “Letters from Members” section (M-292 inquires if former members enjoy hearing from new people. “Oh yes! Indeed they do!” replies Laddie)—I recorded each email address in my notebook. That weekend, I interpolated myself into The Wishing Well, sending forty-odd emails to addresses at long-defunct servers: @gte.net, @localnet.com, @theecoisp.com. They each went something like this:

I accessed The Wishing Well at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope. I am a 28-year-old bisexual woman and have felt drawn to The Wishing Well since I first encountered it last year. I travel back to dip in again and again. I’m like a bucket! I felt inspired to return your twenty-year-old letter. I wanted to ask, did you find her—the woman who is “flexible with no smoking, tattoos, body piercings, little drinking, middle of the road views on many sensitive issues, who can dress up dress down as the occasion dictates, who’s equal times tops and bottoms, no not all hohum”? I’m curious about you, G-1046! I’m searching too.

Nearly every email bounced.

Jacques Lacan, in his analysis of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Purloined Letter,” tells us that “a letter always arrives at its destination.” Or, as Barbara Browning puts it in her novel The Correspondence Artist, “A message in a bottle arrives at its destination the moment it’s thrown into the sea.” Wherever I arrive, I suppose, I was always already going.

 

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It’s unclear what happened to The Wishing Well. I can’t find a more recent edition than the one that bristled with “Have E-Mail”s. I could, perhaps, conjecture that the publication’s disappearance had something to do with this formal change: that when the intervals that once structured our lives contract, what we gain back in time we lose in meaning. Of course, there are also the inventions of the internet, social media, dating apps. What emerges is chatter, a surfeit of messages with nowhere in particular to go.

But the truth is that I don’t know what happened to The Wishing Well. Everyone involved seems to have disappeared just before the internet’s dawn. I can’t find Pat Bartlett’s, Laddie Hosler’s, or Gloria Fudge’s obituaries. Even real-life events—get-togethers in the redwoods and in the Midwest, a seven-day lesbian Caribbean cruise that took place in November of 1977—seem to have no record beyond The Wishing Well’s pages. Emails to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society Archives, the Marin County Free Library, and the archives at the University of Southern California similarly return no clues. In a final attempt, Saskia ran an ad in the “Bits and Pieces” section of The Lesbian Connection, a pay-what-you-can, bimonthly grassroots forum mailed in a plain brown envelope. “Seeking … INFO on The Wishing Well editors,” it read, asking for leads related to “Pat B, Laddie H, and Gloria F.” In it, Saskia generously referred to me as a “researcher.” No one got in touch.

Last month, I arranged The Wishing Well issues chronologically across a table at the archives. I wanted to ensure I wasn’t missing anything. Then, handwritten in the right-hand corner of the cover of Fall 1978, blue with yellowed edges and illustrations of cartoon strawflowers and monarchs, I finally saw what, I suppose, I’d been searching for all along: a letter addressed to me.

Thank you for your edition. Here is your exchange. Sometime perhaps a writer might wish to tackle an article on what we are doing. —Love, Pat