Letters From Home

Letters From Home - Book 1

Note: You can download a PDF of all of the letters from book 1 here.

For me, the most powerful part of writing these books was receiving the letters that appear in the Letters from Home chapter. I know the same was true for Ericka. While we had to make minor edits to hide the Church and program and to use book names, we include those letters here for you, as well as personal notes about the letters that didn't quite fit in the book.

The Letter from Jess

Of all of the letters I got in response to my book, this is the one that means the most to me. I read this letter for the first time half an hour before Jess and I reconnected. I don't cry often, but I did when I read this and I think I cried that whole first call. It turns out that Jess and I were both living in the same State, just the next town over and only a few miles apart from each other. At first, we reconnected over a Zoom chat, but once we knew how close we were, we went out for coffee and then the next morning we had Apple Pie for breakfast.

For many months, we met twice a week and went to as many different places to get Apple Pie for breakfast as we could. We still have breakfast togeather twice a week, but we eat a lot healthier now, though we still sometimes have Apple Pie for breakfast.

This is also the only letter we changed the book for. The book origionally had a plea for Jess to reach out if she ever found this book. That part got taken out of the book after we found her.

The Letter from Sister Beth

After leaving the Island, Beth was some of the only family I had left. She and I got a lot closer after I got out. My daughters grew up calling her Aunt Beth, and she was a fixture at just about every holliday we had. Many of my kids most cherished childhood vacation memories were the ones where we went to visit Aunt Beth - something we did as often as we could.

When this project started to become "real", Beth strongly encouraged me to complete it, and gave me a shebox with every letter I wrote her as a teenager to help. Beth and I kept the tradition of writing each other paper letters from the time I was theirteen until her eye sight gave out less than a year before she died. This was the last letter she ever wrote me. It just feels right to include it in the book.

The Letter from Father Fred

Father Fred's real name is fairly unique. That made tracking him down relatively easy. Contacting Father Fred that first time was a huge risk, we didn't know how he would react. But it was also the best thing we did. If we had not contacted him, we would have never found any of the other girls.  Father Fred kept all of the girl's religious records in his diary. This included the full name, date of birth, and hometown of every single girl, parent names, and other information. For a great many of the girls, he even had criminal case numbers.

When we made the leap of faith and asked him to read an early draft of the book, not only did he write me this letter - the very first response letter we got, written in calligraphy no less - but he also sent along photocopies of every page of his diary with information on the girls in the program. It was this list that gave us the last names of the other girls, and the other information that let us track them all down and let us all reconnect. Without that, we never would have found Jess, had our Reunion, or our new beginning.

Father Fred has become a central part of our survivors' group. He has done a lot of the organizing for us, hosted our first reunion, arranged our group therapy and his Church manages our Survivors Cousins fund.

His new Church has a feel to it that is so loving and welcoming, where kids - even teenagers - play, and that is all the doing of him and his wife. A number of us attend his new church as often as we can. If I lived closer, it would be my families new church.

The Letter from Ericka

Ericka was our leader. She, more than any other girl, made the Guardians work. She is only about 18 months older than me, but she is the girl I looked up to the most. It was really hard asking her to read my book and write me a response letter, I was so worried about what she would think. After reading her book and the many conversations we have had about the Island since reconnecting, I understand just how hard this letter was for her to write, and how many levels of complexity exist in our shared story.

The Letter from Tonya

Tonya was my best friend on the Island. Me at 4'10" and her at 5'11", we were quite the pair! We shared a bunk and hanging rod, we were on the same team and we hung out togeather as much as we possibly could. Once we found her - and she proved to be one of the more difficult ones to find - asking her to read my book and write a response letter was a no brainer. She wrote me this letter just a few weeks before driving to our reunion.

Meeting her oldest daughter for the first time and finding out she is named after me was a trip. V is just like her mother. She and my youngest quickly became thick as theives at our reunion. Tonya and I very quickly fell into the habbit of calling and texting eachother non-stop. I think we talk 10 times a day most days!

Not everyone we asked wrote a letter for me. Uncle Matt, for example, read my book, but I could never get him to write a letter. I think how it all ended was just too painful for him. While it's not in either book, Uncle Matt was engaged to an older Missionary, someone who sided with Ms. Rawlings. When Matt left, she stayed, ending their engagement. It really broke his heart, so I fully understand why he couldn't bring himself to write a letter. His love for me and my kids over the years means far more than a letter.

I also got letters I couldn't use. Jenna's letter was so powerful that I really wish I could share it. But most of it was about how the Island closed, and it couldn't be edited to hide the church, so I was forced to leave it out. Maxine was going through a Manic episode when she wrote her letter. While it gives some insight into her, you needed to have gotten to know her outside of a manic episode to get it. My co-author couldn’t even understand it, even when I tried to explaine it to him.

All of the letters I received mean a lot to me. In every letter, I got to see pieces of the puzzle that I didn't know and never would have known if I hadn't written this book. I learned so much about myself writing this, but it's what I learned in these letters and the conversations that came after that have given more closure on this part of my life than anything else. And for that, I am etearnally greatful.

Vanessa White

Letters From Home - Book 2

Note: You can download a PDF of all of the letters from book 2 here.

I only wrote my book because one of my co-authors worked with me to write the response letter to Vanessa’s book. I think in many ways writing that response letter was more difficult than writing my book. I couldn't really tell my story in the letter like I did in the book. I had to write that in a short period of time, as our co-author only had so much time to work with me on it and space in the book was limited. But it led to my writing my book and actually telling my story. So when we got towards the end of writing my story, I knew I wanted to include response letters like Vanessa did in hers.

For this book, my first coauthor worked with Lisa and Betty, and my second coauthor worked with Christi to write me these response letters. Getting a copy of the letter Mrs. Bennet wrote to Lisa was an unexpected surprise. But I feel I must warn you, these are very emotional, they made me cry when I first read them. You can credit/blame my coauthors for bringing out the emotions, none of us could have done it without them.

I also got response letters from Paula and Sadie, but those letters were far too intertwined with the Church for us to be able to use them in the book, but they still mean a lot to me.

The Letter from Mrs Bennet to Sister Lisa

When I was given this letter, I had no idea just how importiant it was or how much this letter would affect my life. I had absolutely no idea how much Mrs. Bennet did for me in this situation. Even today, part of me still wonders why she did all of this for me. I may never fully understand it, but I am thankful that she did all that she did for me.

The Letter from Sister Lisa

Because of Mrs. Bennet, Lisa and I have stayed in touch over the years. While the gay issue had been a rift in our relationship, we never stopped talking, mostly because thats what Mrs. Bennet wanted. We wrote my book in secret. But I eventually took the risk and asked Lisa to read it and write a response, and I am really glad I did that.

Lisa and I are a lot closer now than we had been, closer than we have ever been. We still don't see eye to eye on the gay issue, but we have learned to set that aside for the greater good.

The Letter from Christi

I don't know if it really comes across in my book, but Christi was my right hand when we were Guardians, and she was my best friend. She was so good at the quiet art of diplomacy, that I was sure she would become a politician! But for so many of the most delicate and touchy situations, anything that needed real finesse, Christi and her Green Team are who I sent in to deal with it.

Christi is one of the most intelligent people I know, she has a knack for seeing things no one else does, and for seeing non-obvious solutions where everyone feels like they won. But Christi has a severe learning disability that was only diagnosed a few years ago. If not for that, she would have graduated from Officer Candidate School, and I believe she would have been an outstanding Commissioned Officer in the Navy.

To write me this letter, Christi needed a lot of help from my second co-author, Noah, to actually get her words on paper and organized in a meaningful way. Knowing how much work Christi put into writing this and how difficult it was for her, it means even more to me.

The Letter from Betty

Sometimes you get something that really suprises you. Betty's letter really suprised me. I had mostly forgotten the Angel assignments Mr. S gave us at Christmas. For me, they were really minor tasks, usually something I could fix quickly and move on to the next project.

Being a Guardian was all about making our girls lives better. It was all about bridging the gaps and making our girls human again. What Betty did for Becky, how she took her under her wing and helped her to figure it out, how she changed her life for the better, well, that shows what the Guardians were for as much as anything else I can think of. Until I read her letter, I never knew that Betty did what she did, but honestly, reading her letter, it's hard to explain just how proud of her I am for what she did and I wonder how many more of these stories other girls have that I just don't know about.

Now that you have read these lettters and my thoughts on them, I hope it gives you a little more insight into the fighting spirit of my Guardians, and what we tried to accomplish. Just remember, it's not often that girls like us get to reinvent ourselves into the people we want to be. But I think every girl (and boy) should have that opertunity in life.

Ericka Brown