Dear Cathy

Dear Cathy, From My Typewriter to the World

I had a “Dear Cathy” advice column in the Global Teen Club International newsletter. That was my space, my byline, my responsibility. I come from an era of newsletters and zines so different from web zines that we see today. We didn’t have a publish button. We had a deadline, a typewriter, white-out, and a trip to the post office.

I published things in a newsletter following the rules of journalism. That mattered to me. “Dear Cathy” wasn’t just me giving my opinion. It was journalism. I verified what I could. I changed names to protect privacy. I never printed a rumor. If a teen wrote in about bullying, I didn’t just say “hang in there.” I called a school counselor, got real resources, and ran them at the bottom of the column with phone numbers that worked. That was the rule: you don’t publish harm, you publish help.

The Global Teen Club International was my mother’s vision, but the newsletter was our sweat. We laid it out on the kitchen table. Cut, paste, literally. Rubber cement and ruler lines. We folded it by hand, licked the stamps, and sent it to 40+ countries. I remember holding the stack of letters from teens in Australia, Kenya, Germany, Brazil. Real paper. Real handwriting. Real problems. Boyfriend trouble in Tokyo. Parents divorcing in Toronto. First crush, first heartbreak, first time feeling alone in a crowded school — all of it landed in my mailbox.

I took “Dear Cathy” serious because I knew what it felt like to wait for the mail. I knew a girl in South Africa was going to open that newsletter and look for her letter. She wasn’t going to get an instant DM. She was going to get an answer six weeks later, typed double-spaced, signed “Cathy.” So it had to be right. It had to be true. It had to be useful.

That’s what’s different from web zines that we see today. Web zines are fast, and fast isn’t always careful. A blog can go up at 2AM with no editor, no fact-check, no second set of eyes. A newsletter had a masthead. You knew who the editor was. You knew where to send a correction. You could hold it, fold it, pass it to a friend. It had weight. It had ink that got on your fingers. It had a cost — paper, stamps, time — so you didn’t waste words.

I followed the rules of journalism because my mother taught me that print is permanent. You can’t hit delete on a newsletter sitting in someone’s drawer. So I learned AP style before I was 15. I learned to attribute. I learned to ask, “Is this kind, is this true, is this necessary?” I learned that “anonymous” still meant I had to know who they were, even if the readers didn’t.

“Dear Cathy” taught me to listen. Teens weren’t asking for clichés. They were asking for a grown-up to take them serious and tell them the truth without talking down. So I did. I told a girl in Ohio she deserved better than a boy who hit her. I told a boy in London it was okay to cry when his dog died. I told a kid in Texas how to find a library if home wasn’t safe.

That was my first newsroom. The kitchen table. The sound of the typewriter. The smell of rubber cement. No analytics, no likes, no comments section. Just letters in, answers out, and the hope that somewhere across the world, a teen read it and felt less alone.

I come from that era. And I wouldn’t trade it for all the clicks in the world.