132: Women's History Month & FAQs to Submitting Letters

TFAW Project

Mar 06, 2026

∙ Paid

If you could reflect on one thing, it’s this:

Who has shaped you into who you are today? Was it one woman or many?

Happy Women’s History Month!

Over the next four weeks, I’ll be sharing reflections on what this month represents and, more importantly, how it can serve as a loving reminder to share our own stories.

After all, history is simply a collection of stories.

So why not ours? 💛

Women’s History Month has been a national celebration since 1981 to recognize the contributions women have made throughout American history, across families, communities, and in every field. It’s our time to honor those who came before us and the impact they’ve had on shaping the world we live in today.

But history isn’t only written in textbooks.

For us, it often lives in the stories we cherish about the women who raised us, guided us, challenged us, and believed in us. Our stories are of courage, sacrifice, and often, thankless impact.

Based on the conversations we’ve had on our show, many of us have been greatly shaped by our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters, girlfriends, and generally, a collection of women.

Yet many of those stories were never written down. For many of us, storytelling happens through conversations shared at dinner tables, family gatherings, and in learning how to connect the dots between generations.

We embody each other's stories, but rarely document them.

Until now…

TFAW Letters is a space to record personal stories that have shaped us, not the famous stories found in history books, but the intimate ones that influence our lives both visibly and invisibly.

Sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that are finally shared out loud.

So this week, in celebration of Women’s History Month, I’m inviting you to reflect on this question:

Who helped shape the path you’re on today?

If you’d like, you can start your reflection with a simple line:

“If I could say one thing to (the woman, or women, I want to thank), it’s this...”

Submit A Letter Today

Already Subscribed? Check out the footer of our previous emails to learn how to submit a letter today. You may include your name or remain completely anonymous.

Women’s history isn’t only something we study. It’s something we continue to write together, one letter at a time. 📝

FAQs: Submitting A Letter to TFAWLETTERS.COM

Note: Audio version is available for First Readers. Enjoy the edited transcript!

Jen Amos: Hello there, First Readers. I am really excited to candidly answer some frequently asked questions that I have received regarding submitting a letter, in hopes that this will make people feel safer and more comfortable, and free to submit a letter how they please.

So, the first question is…

Who can submit a letter?

And the answer is: anyone.
When you visit our mailbox, there’s a link to submit a letter that’s only available to our subscribers. So if you’re not subscribed (although anyone listening to this will already be subscribed), all you have to do is just subscribe for free, and in the footer of every newsletter for your subscription level, there’s a button where you can visit our mailbox and submit a letter.
Now, when you submit a letter, you’re gonna be taken to a Google form, and you can fill it out anonymously. If you want me to contact you, then you can add your email. But otherwise, I have no idea who submits letters.
My hope is that anyone who wants to submit a letter does so in a way that frees them. Maybe something they’ve been holding in for a long time, something that they were afraid to say out loud, or something that they don’t know how to say in a way that they won’t regret later.

The benefit of submitting these letters is that you can submit them as is, because the next common question I often get is…

What happens when I submit a letter?

I work with an amazing team that takes inspiration from your submission, similar submissions, and conversations to create the first draft. Now, of course, depending on the letter, depending on how descriptive it is... just depending, most of the letters so far have rarely been that someone submits something and we’re like, “That’s perfect, let’s read that on the show.”
At the end of the day, this is my creative interpretation of these letter submissions and similar conversations. So we take inspiration from your letter, but we don’t read it verbatim on the show. We put a lot of love and care into trying to capture the spirit of what you’re trying to say in the way that we understand it. ‘Cause we’ll never entirely know, especially if you’re submitting anonymously, we’ll never entirely know exactly what you’re trying to say. All we can do is take inspiration from your submission, interpret it in a way we can relate to, and put it in a letter.
Even then, it gets put into a first draft. So the first draft can pull inspiration from your submission, other people’s submissions, and conversations our team has had that we can relate to, and pour it into this draft.
So already, I want you to hear that this is not me just taking your letter and reading it verbatim on the show. In celebration of being Filipino and the spirit of kapwa, which is, “I am because we are,” having that collective spirit... it takes a village to write these letters.
So hopefully you find some comfort in knowing that. It really just means that you can say what you really wanna say. We wanna listen, and we wanna capture the heart of what we feel like you’re saying and channel it into a first draft.
Now I say first draft because ultimately I have to read it on the show. What is written down is not always exactly what can be read on the show. It’s one thing to read something, and it’s another thing to speak it. Reading and speaking are different, and it’s highly dependent on my own style of speaking.
So the first draft goes through a couple of iterations as I practice reading it out loud. Now, if you wanna hear the first draft, I do a cold read for First Readers. First readers (like you, who are listening to this), when I am reading it out loud fresh, I am pulling inspiration from that. Or I am switching certain words around that I feel comfortable with saying because I have to make sure that I’m speaking as authentically as I can. This is not just about reading your letter; it’s about sharing a part of myself in your letter, too.
Overall, it takes a village to write these letters, let alone speak them out loud. There are certain things I may not be comfortable saying, and there may be other ways I would prefer to say them.
So just as a recap, anyone can submit a letter. You don’t have to really answer all the questions. The questions are there in the Google form to get your creative juices flowing. But ultimately, you can share as much as you wanna share. Our team takes inspiration from that letter; we may categorize it with similar submissions and have a dialogue about it, along with similar submissions. And together, we work on writing a first draft, and then I work on the final draft that gets read on the podcast.
When I say that I work on the final draft (and this is part of the cold read for first readers), I literally read it out loud and allow my natural voice to rephrase some things, change others, or keep things as they are in real time. It just highly depends on how it flows.

Now, the next question is:

When does the letter get released?

I’ll tell you, there are some letters that took months to put together. Not because it’s overly complicated, but because, like cooking, you just gotta let some things stew for a while.
So that’s why, in the off-season, in the pen pal edition, I have nearly a handful of first drafts that have been written. But it’s important to give the drafts some time to stew, to sit, and let us process before we revisit them and say, “okay it’s time to practice reading these out loud.”
So also dependent on whether the letter is relevant for a given season. Like upcoming, we have Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which we’ll probably curate the letters that talk a lot about heritage.
In the summer series, like last year, it’ll probably just be a variety of letters. And then in October, we have Filipino American History Month, so that’ll likely be history-centric. And then we have the holiday series, which will ideally revolve more around family, friends, or chosen family. But again, it depends heavily on whether the letter is ready.
The key takeaway I want you to get is that I hope that you treat submitting a letter like a wishing well. Like leaving a lock on a special fence and leaving that lock like a wish, or you throw a coin in the water, treat it like a wishing well. Treat it like, “Here’s a secret of mine that I just wanna release and just put it out in the world.” The act of just putting it out there, I have personally found to be a therapeutic experience.
And this is what my letter submission people who talk to me say, “Wow, it’s so freeing. Even though the person I want to hear this may never hear this, I’m glad that I was able to get it out there. I’m content because I found the words to articulate what I really wanted to say.”
Because sometimes the one thing you’re really trying to say to someone is the one thing you are trying to identify for yourself. It could just be the one thing of what do I really need? From that person? For myself?
And sometimes just getting it out there helps you uncover what it is you really want out of all of this.
So, what is the one thing you’re really trying to say?

Okay, last question:

What if I don’t like the final letter?

What I would say is: if you don’t like the final letter, I’d like you to recall the last time someone said something about you that you didn’t like to hear. Someone told you an honest truth about yourself that you just completely deny, or you don’t believe is true. And I’d like you to take that same feeling and see the final letter that way.
Again, keep in mind that most of these letters embody the spirit of our shared experiences on a given topic or issue. And if you don’t like it, consider understanding why. Take it as an opportunity to reflect, and maybe what you put out there... maybe what you submitted wasn’t clear enough. Maybe what you said wasn’t really what you were trying to say.
Sometimes we can say things to certain people, and it just goes over their head, right? I’m sure you’ve given people plenty of advice, and they just don’t listen to you. The same thing could be said about, “Hey, let me try to express to you how I really feel.”
Sometimes, for example, people will express anger when really they’re scared. And so hopefully the letter gives you that friction to be like, “That’s not what I meant to say.”
If you feel that way, if you have that kind of reaction, take that as a moment of reflection and ask yourself, “Okay, what did I really mean to say?” And really observe, “Okay, what I really meant to say is this... But apparently, the letter came out this way. I said one thing, but you interpreted it another way. Now, next time, how can I articulate this in a way that you will understand what I’m trying to say? ‘Cause apparently what I said didn’t come across the way I needed to be understood.” So people won’t always understand what we mean to say.
In any romantic relationship, I’m sure we can all relate to the fact that our significant others won’t always understand what we’re trying to say. And I want you to understand that, if the final letter didn’t represent you, maybe it’s not what you wanted to hear, but what you needed to hear.

Anyway, I hope that helps, and last but not least:

Can I send an audio message?

And the answer is: absolutely! I personally like to use Otter, otter.ai. I do have a referral link where you can sign up for a one-month trial — just click HERE.
Really, all you need is a month, if not less, to just submit one or a few audio messages to me. Otter.ai automatically transcribes what you’re saying. So it makes it easier for me to accept that transcript as your letter submission. Once you record, email me so I can give you the next steps for submitting it!

And there you have it! Those are the frequently asked questions I get when submitting a letter.

I hope that this eases your fears and reassures you that this is really a wishing well. This is an opportunity to release something, like having a balloon, or a floating lantern (Disney’s Tangled, anyone???), and release it to the sky, kind of thing. And I hope this reassures you that we’ll go to great lengths to represent you while respecting your privacy.