 Alex Boles reads other people's mail.
What she's doing isn't illegal.
Last April, Boles, a fourth-year student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., created Unwritten Letters Project, a blog that encourages people to send letters they've written but never mailed as a way to get feelings off their chests.
"It's very therapeutic to be able to get out in some kind of fashion what you want to say, whether that be in writing or actually saying it," Boles said. "It's very cathartic."
Boles speaks from experience.
"I think I started [writing letters in my diary] in middle school to childhood crushes or my parents if I was mad at them for disciplining me in some fashion," she said. "I probably have 10 diaries that I saved. I'd write letters to my crushes and friends and teachers and parents."
Mary Swoboda, a licensed clinical social worker at Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said therapeutic letter-writing can help people understand and sort through personal issues.
"Once you write things down, you don't have to think about it," Swoboda said. "And rereading can help make sense of things."
Writing letters and not sending them can help validate why a person has certain feelings and let them know it's OK to have those feelings, Swoboda said.
People from all over the world write therapeutic notes via e-mail to Unwritten Letters Project to express their emotions. Boles said she also gets comments from people telling her how beneficial it was to write letters and read those of others.
"I've received letters from China and Malaysia ... and everywhere," she said. "It's really kind of fascinating. I don't know how it's reaching these other countries, but it is."
The idea was born from a family communication class at Truman State. Boles said she and her classmates formed a family-like bond through discussions about difficult tasks.
"I was really inspired by the class and wondered what outlets people used to express themselves," Boles said.
She created the Web site on a Wordpress page and showed the class. Her professor decided to use the Web site as an extra-credit project. Eventually, the Web site inspired an addition to the public communication curriculum - a class about social media and how it applies to projects like Unwritten Letters Project - and a book, which Boles said should come out by the end of the week.
She said she had to dig through more than 450 submissions since April to select the ones printed in the globally distributed book.
Alex Boles created Unwritten Letters Project in April. Courtesy photo
Fans like the English university student are why Boles chose to publish a book so quickly after the Web site's creation. She said she always planned on her Web site's content lending itself to a book, but the popularity of the site and the interest in a book made Boles move faster and begin work on the book at the end of September.
"Once I started, the demand for the book kind of skyrocketed. I made it a priority," she said.
After the book is printed through LeClere Books, a publishing company Boles's mother operates, it will be available in about 150 countries at Borders, Barnes and Noble and through amazon.com. Boles said she also plans to make the book available at smaller, individual bookstores.
Truman State's bookstore is hosting a book-signing Dec. 2 for Boles, who, according to the managerial staff of the store, is the first Truman State student to have a book for sale on campus. A release party in St. Louis, Boles's hometown, "is going to be pretty big," she said.
Don Krause, one of Boles's communication professors at Truman State, said Unwritten Letters Project is more than just therapeutic notes.
"It's become something that's really starting to touch people's lives," Krause said. "With social media [like blogs], we can reach out to people across the world."
After her book's publication, Boles plans to go on a lecture tour to talk about bullying prevention, using letters submitted to Unwritten Letters Project as a method of combating the issue. But her plans don't stop there.
"I hope to make this my job one day, to run this company, to combat bullying and to maintain this Web site and subsequent projects," she said.
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We are a blessed family, from my mother (author, publisher) to my other two sisters (Carissa and Jenny). Keep up the great work Alex, you are inspiring the world to be a better place.
Love you!
Brandi