Why I Started a Good News Mail Club (And What Monet Has to Do With It)

The world feels heavy. I don't have to convince you of that — you already know.

For a long time, I thought my job as an artist was to feel that heaviness fully and somehow turn it into something useful. To process it. To make sense of it. To say something profound about it. And honestly? That paralyzed me. I made nothing for a long time.

Then I found out about the water lilies.

Monet painted his most famous water lily series during World War I.

Bombs were falling on Paris. He was in his 70s, half-blind from cataracts, grieving. And while the world was burning, he stood in his garden in Giverny and painted — over and over — the same pond, the same flowers, the same shifting light.

People at the time criticized him for it. How could you paint flowers in a war?

But here's what I think they missed: he wasn't ignoring the war. He knew exactly what was happening. He chose, every single day, to make something beautiful anyway. Not because beauty fixes the war. Because beauty is the thing the war is trying to take from you, and he refused to hand it over.

That story changed me.

The day I almost started a good news mail club

I'm Vanessa. I'm an artist who almost didn't become one because I told myself for too long that I'd started too late. I have a husband, a kid, ADHD, a full life, and the same relentless news cycle as everyone else. And one day I sat down and asked myself a question I'd been avoiding:

If I can't fix the world, what can I make for it?

The answer I landed on first was a good news mail club. A monthly reminder — sent in the mail — of beautiful things still happening in the world. Stories about communities helping each other. Scientific breakthroughs. Acts of kindness. With some art and a sticker.

I designed Issue 01 around that idea. I curated the stories. I built the letter structure around them.

And then, somewhere between sketching it out and writing the first letter, I realized something uncomfortable: curating good news every month wasn't going to be sustainable for me. I started to feel like a curator. The truth is, I don't have control over what comes from the world. I only have control over what comes from me.

So I stopped — before I sent anything out — and changed direction.

What Peachy Parcels actually is now

Peachy Parcels is a letter from me, written by hand, every month. Inside it: where I am as an artist that month — what I'm exploring with my watercolor crayons and acrylic markers, what's working, what isn't, what got me unstuck. Sent slowly, by hand, to people who've been missing making things.

If something good in the world made me feel good this month, you'll hear about it — but as a sentence in the story, not the headline.

This isn't a good news delivery service. I'm not aggregating happy headlines so you can feel better. There are apps for that.

This is an artist sending you mail.

It's me, in my house, every month — writing about what I'm noticing, drawing the thing I want to draw, making the small body of work that belongs to this season of my practice. It's specific to that month. It's specific to me. It's slow.

And it lands in your mailbox or your inbox because some of you needed exactly this — a person, making something for you, in a world that mostly doesn't anymore.

Who this is for

If you've ever felt like creativity is something you used to have, or something you weren't allowed to keep, or something you don't know how to start again — Peachy Parcels was made for you.

If you used to draw, paint, journal, or just play, and somewhere along the way stopped — this is for you.

If you've ever felt the heaviness of the world and wished someone would just send you a thoughtful letter — this is for you, too.

There are two ways in:

The Collector ($15/month) — physical mail, art, sticker, habit card, playlist QR, the whole thing.

The Reader ($6/month) — the digital version, letter + playlist + Postmark.

Both are made by hand. Both are made by me. Both are made because Monet was right — and because making something beautiful anyway is still, somehow, what artists do.

Stay peachy,

🍑 Vanessa