Writing letters seems to be a lost art in the age of texting, email, Snapchat and even the ever present cell-phone that enables us to call one another at any moment of the day.

But there was a time when letter writing was all there was. Reading the letters between, say, John and Abigail Adams, is not only a study in love between two extraordinary people, but an invaluable record of history.

It is interesting that A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, which premiered in 1988, right before the ubiquity of cell-phones and email began, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It was as if the Pulitzer committee knew that it was a dying genre and wanted to honor it one last time. Love Letters, performed by Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, will be at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit next April.

But that is not why I am writing this today—to preview a play still months away. Forgive a moment of self-promotion, but I, with my sister Anne Kiley and brother-in-law Thomas Pellechia have edited a book of letters, published by Prometheus Books, called Writing The War: Chronicles of a WWII Correspondent. It is a chronology of the war as told through the letters of my parents who met in January 1942 and courted one another largely through letters while my father was in Europe as a war correspondent for The Stars and Stripes newspaper.

Until we got into the project, and until we performed our first readings of the letters last weekend, we really did not know how it would be received. Would people—people who did not know our parents—find the letters, the romance, the vivid detail of life in London, Paris, Belgium, and on the home-front from my mother, as compelling as we did? Judging from the tremendous response we got, my parents’ writing is striking a chord in people who perhaps don’t know that they long for beautiful letter writing from their loved ones rather than an emoji.

It’s a good thing that my parents were such good letter writers. It made the task of editing over 800 letters into a readable digestible book both easy and hard; easy because we did not have to reach for good material, and hard because there was so much of it.

Actress Marlene Inman and I are going to do a reading from the letters at Nicola’s Book Store in Ann Arbor, in the Westgate Shopping Center, 2513 Jackson Ave, Ann Arbor on Monday November 2. If you are a fan of WWII history, romance, or perhaps even the play Love Letters, I invite you to come and support a local independent bookstore the way so many people support our local theaters.