{"id":172593,"date":"2026-01-16T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172593"},"modified":"2026-01-20T10:34:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T15:34:05","slug":"the-wishing-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/16\/the-wishing-well\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wishing Well"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, Summer 1979. Images from the collection of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI am once again looking for a special woman to share my life with,\u201d 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\u2019s looking for into a list of likes (reading, correspondence, San Francisco) and dislikes (organized religion, people who make a career of being \u201cpolitically correct,\u201d anything wherein women<\/em> is spelled womyn<\/em>, the \u201cslobby-dyke look\u2014baggy pants, flapping vests, keyrings, etc.\u201d). These are the ladies of The Wishing Well<\/em>, and they are\u2014unremittingly, very badly\u2014looking for love.<\/p>\n

The Wishing Well<\/em>, named for the Radclyffe Hall novel The Well of Loneliness<\/em>, was a print personals magazine, then called a \u201ccorrespondence service,\u201d 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\u2019s difficult to sustain patience, and I recognized myself in the Wishing Well<\/em> writers\u2019 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<\/em> everyone\u2019s<\/em> last chance?)<\/p>\n

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, \u201cI\u2019m here for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMe?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re the one who keeps emailing about The Wishing Well<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was Saskia, I realized\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to hear what you love about it,\u201d she said as we climbed the mahogany steps of the brownstone that\u2019s been the archives\u2019 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<\/em> 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\u2019s been involved in the archives since 1989, when they were still housed in Nestle\u2019s Upper West Side apartment, and enjoys the renewed excitement conferred by its steady stream of visitors. She told me, \u201cI always find new things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except that day, we couldn\u2019t find any copies of The Wishing Well<\/em>. They weren\u2019t among the W<\/em>\u2019s\u2014where they\u2019d been every other time\u2014nor 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\u2019d both looked countless times, this time there they were.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, Summer 1978.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

After a few years of publication, Bartlett brought aboard Laddie Hosler as a coeditor. By that point, The Wishing Well<\/em>\u2014a stapled stock-paper booklet\u2014already had a thousand subscribers. Alongside personals, it featured poetry, abbreviation guides, illustrations, debates on bisexuality, word searches for phrases like wishful lover<\/em>, apologies, ads for signature jewelry, book reviews, field reports from relevant events like the 1972 New Jersey Women\u2019s Fair (\u201cIt was beautiful. So much information: childbirth alternatives, yoga, baking bread, rape!\u201d), 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<\/em>\u2019s California-based office to the intended recipients. Only when the writer and respondent chose to exchange addresses were they transformed into correspondents.<\/p>\n

Typically, letters don\u2019t become public until long after they\u2019re sent. There\u2019s a level of popular intrigue required to warrant a published collection, museum, or archival exhibition. But The Wishing Well <\/em>inverted that progression: ordinary letters started as public listings and aspired toward private exchange. Subscribers\u2019 bids for love were recorded, sealed, and postmarked, then\u2014just as a coin, imbued with want, is kissed and cast out into a wishing well\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, April 1976.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise that the mail\u2014a vast, invisible circulatory network that allows us to sidestep time and space, our foremost confinements\u2014is so readily invested with the properties of the mystical. Early editions of The Wishing Well<\/em> 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: \u201cTHE WISHING WELL \u2026 IT WORKS!\u201d attests the text beneath. Another\u2014\u201cWAITING A WANTING\u201d\u2014stands wistfully before her mailbox, anticipating the beloved she\u2019s summoned.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone who writes a love letter becomes a woman,\u201d Cathy Davidson writes in The Book of Love<\/em>, which compiles over a hundred love letters, from Ana\u00efs Nin to D. H. Lawrence to Henry James to Virginia Woolf, in an attempt to define the love letter\u2019s ten essential features as a genre (the above is number eight). The seventh: \u201cThe cogito<\/em> of the love letter is: \u2018I write, therefore you are.\u2019 \u201d The Wishing Well<\/em>\u2019s listings represent a similar sort of conjuring. They are not merely records of longing, but creative acts\u2014invocations, calls into being. Becoming the beloved is the project of becoming the letter\u2019s addressee.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, Spring 1978.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, Spring 1977.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Wishing Well<\/em> contains chronicles of success and failure, of venturing forth, moving on, starting over. \u201cBecause of The Wishing Well <\/em>I met Linda,\u201d writes one subscriber. \u201cWe wrote, faltered, shared of ourselves and slowly fell in love. Me\u2014a woman who didn\u2019t 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\u2014self-labeled bisexual\u2014left her man, not for a woman love but for Linda\u2019s sake.\u201d At a different station stands L-231: \u201cJust 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.\u201d And at still another waypoint are the humane, tentative tiptoes of 0-266: \u201cI\u2019ve been alone for six years now. I can\u2019t 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\u2019m afraid sometimes of starting again. The first step is the worst \u2026 I think I\u2019ve just taken it.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Like the archives\u2019 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<\/em> to her ex. \u201cMost of all, I will be leaving Laddie whom I have loved as I have loved The Wishing Well<\/em>,\u201d she wrote. Laddie also responded publicly: \u201cI become aware of how much you have given me, perhaps the most precious part of you: The Wishing Well<\/em>. 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.\u201d In a third letter, written together, Pat and Laddie urged their readers not to be disheartened by the ending of their partnership. \u201cBegin new relationships,\u201d they encouraged.<\/p>\n

And Laddie did. The August 1980 edition introduces a woman named Gloria Fudge\u2014not only as an editor, but as Laddie\u2019s wife. You can probably guess how they met.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, Summer 1979.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the early aughts, a new technology arrived to The Wishing Well<\/em>: email. I\u2019ve found only one edition from this period, in which the phrase \u201cHave E-mail\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

During one of my expeditions to the archives\u2014inspired by a \u201cLetters from Members\u201d section (M-292 inquires if former members enjoy hearing from new people. \u201cOh yes! Indeed they do!\u201d replies Laddie)\u2014I recorded each email address in my notebook. That weekend, I interpolated myself into The Wishing Well<\/em>, sending forty-odd emails to addresses at long-defunct servers: @gte.net, @localnet.com, @theecoisp.com. They each went something like this:<\/p>\n

I accessed The Wishing Well<\/em> at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope. I am a 28-year-old bisexual woman and have felt drawn to The Wishing Well<\/em> since I first encountered it last year. I travel back to dip in again and again. I\u2019m like a bucket! I felt inspired to return your twenty-year-old letter. I wanted to ask, did you find her\u2014the woman who is \u201cflexible 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\u2019s equal times tops and bottoms, no not all hohum\u201d? I\u2019m curious about you, G-1046! I\u2019m searching too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nearly every email bounced.<\/p>\n

Jacques Lacan, in his analysis of the Edgar Allan Poe short story \u201cThe Purloined Letter,\u201d tells us that \u201ca letter always arrives at its destination.\u201d Or, as Barbara Browning puts it in her novel The Correspondence Artist<\/em>, \u201cA message in a bottle arrives at its destination the moment it\u2019s thrown into the sea.\u201d Wherever I arrive, I suppose, I was always already going.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

The Wishing Well<\/em>, November 1982.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear what happened to The Wishing Well<\/em>. I can\u2019t find a more recent edition than the one that bristled with \u201cHave E-Mail\u201ds. I could, perhaps, conjecture that the publication\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But the truth is that I don\u2019t know what happened to The Wishing Well<\/em>. Everyone involved seems to have disappeared just before the internet\u2019s dawn. I can\u2019t find Pat Bartlett\u2019s, Laddie Hosler\u2019s, or Gloria Fudge\u2019s obituaries. Even real-life events\u2014get-togethers in the redwoods and in the Midwest, a seven-day lesbian Caribbean cruise that took place in November of 1977\u2014seem to have no record beyond The Wishing Well<\/em>\u2019s 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 \u201cBits and Pieces\u201d section of The Lesbian Connection<\/em>, a pay-what-you-can, bimonthly grassroots forum mailed in a plain brown envelope. \u201cSeeking \u2026 INFO on The Wishing Well <\/em>editors,\u201d it read, asking for leads related to \u201cPat B, Laddie H, and Gloria F.\u201d In it, Saskia generously referred to me as a \u201cresearcher.\u201d No one got in touch.<\/p>\n

Last month, I arranged The Wishing Well <\/em>issues chronologically across a table at the archives. I wanted to ensure I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019d been searching for all along: a letter addressed to me.<\/p>\n

Thank you for your edition. Here is your exchange. Sometime perhaps a writer might wish to tackle an article on what we are doing. \u2014Love, Pat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Isabelle Appleton\u2019s work has appeared in <\/em>Joyland, Conjunctions, The New England Review, and elsewhere.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe cogito of the love letter: I write, therefore you are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2645,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68530],"tags":[33,67827,68783],"class_list":["post-172593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters","tag-archives","tag-featured","tag-lesbian-literature"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Wishing Well by Isabelle Appleton<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 16, 2026 \u2013 \u201cThe cogito of the love letter: I write, therefore you are.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/16\/the-wishing-well\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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