For this successful author, an encouraging word is what she most wants to share with others.

People travel through life, and if they are truly fortunate, they attract and collect friends along the way. These relationships typically come and go, with some lasting only a short time, while others endure for a lifetime.

Regardless, each friend discovered along the journey of life contributes something, a nugget of wisdom here, a shared experience there, adversity battled and overcome together, adventures shared and relived. They provide the currency of connection and points of contact that create an amazing tableau of memories.

And, maybe more than anything else, a humbling sense of gratefulness that these people paused in the busyness of their own lives and cared enough to share varying degrees of adventure and humanity.

For Texas Tech University alumna Amy Weinland Daughters, this is the sweet spot, the place where she came to realize one of the best favors she could ever do for her friends (and herself) was to let them know just how much their presence meant to her.

“These people all fit into my life somehow,” she said, reflecting on the friendships she has formed. “These were real people living real lives who had a real impact.”

Amy wanted to say thank you to all of them in a way that would leave a lasting impression, so she tackled the challenge with gusto, combining old-school determination with new-school vision. It was equal parts geometry and gratefulness.

Before long, she had an Excel spreadsheet with almost 600 names.

Then, beginning in 2017 and continuing over the span of the next year and a half, she wrote every single one of them a note of encouragement, a thank-you for stopping by in her life, for just being present and accounted for when it mattered.

“And it absolutely blew up my life,” she said. “I realized how grateful I was, and the most important thing was reaching out to people via a handwritten letter was so special. It didn’t matter how they voted or what their religion was or anything like that. What mattered instead were things like we were in high school together, and there was a moment they really helped me through. Whatever the story happened to be, that was the part that really mattered.”

Birth of a notion

The idea of sending uplifting personal missives might have struck Amy’s fancy years earlier, long before she entertained the idea of becoming a professional writer.

Actually, the connection dates to 1986 when she and another young woman named Dana became fast friends at a six-week summer camp just outside Houston, which was where Amy grew up.

Like many such friendships forged during a relatively short span, the two went their separate ways once the camp ended.

Dana, who was four years older than Amy, attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Amy decided to attend Texas Tech, and it took literally no time for the campus to find a place deep in her heart.

“I am a really big sports fan, and I will never forget the first day I walked across campus with that big Double T scoreboard and I heard the band,” she remembered. “It changed my life forever. I had grown up an NFL fan, but that’s when I became a college football fan.”

From Amy’s point of view, one of the threads of connectivity that runs through both the project and her life is Texas Tech. She is a passionate fan of the Red Raider brand and has been since those days long ago when she drove to the Lubbock campus from her Houston home.

A first-year student living in Horn Hall, Amy discovered just how large the campus was when she got lost – in spite of having a map. That was just part of the charm of finding her way through life.

“I remember walking across campus thinking to myself, ‘This is the first day of the Amy Weinland Adventure,” she said, “the first day of this being my deal. For me, there still is absolutely a connection between Texas Tech and so many of the things I’ve done in my life. Texas Tech is where I officially launched the boat out into the waters of life.”

Texas Tech also helped Amy realize that she could do anything, even though at the time she was decades away from taking on the sizable friend-contacting challenge (and social media was not yet a thing).

She started out as an accounting major in what is now the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business, but it wasn’t her calling and she changed to business management. 

“I was probably completely in over my head, and I still joke about the accounting thing, but it taught me a lot of lessons,” she said. “Texas Tech taught me to believe in myself, and I feel like my graduation from Texas Tech is one of the greatest accomplishments in my life.”

Time marched on and social media emerged as a ubiquitous tool of connection. One day in 2014, Amy decided to look up Dana on Facebook and perhaps get a glimpse of what was going on in her life.

Turns out Dana Rivera was living in south Louisiana and had a family that included five children. The youngest, her son Parker, was at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis battling cancer.

Amy, now married and with two children of her own, read Dana’s request that people pray for her son. This was an easy lift for Amy, whose personal motto came from the biblical book of 1 Thessalonians: “Be joyful always, pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances.”

“As a mom myself, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is bad,’” she recalled. “I just started praying right there. She had no idea at this time I was looking to connect, but I got invested in the story, and I started following it.”

Dana was an LSU football fan, another point of connection with Amy, who had transitioned into a writing career and was delivering content regularly about college football for Bleacher Report, an online sports news outlet.

Soon, Parker went into remission, but Amy didn’t think the time was right to try and rekindle their friendship because Dana and her family had just been through so much. She put the idea to the side and threw herself back into full-time writing.

But, at the end of 2014, Parker’s cancer returned.

“They went back to Memphis, and you could just tell it wasn’t good,” Amy said. “I was in church one Sunday, and I was thinking about what I could do or even if I should get involved. I was sitting there and suddenly, I’m like, ‘You know what I’ll do. I will start sending Dana and Parker letters.’”

Never mind that Amy admitted it had been at least 25 years since she’d actually put pen to paper, written a letter and put its fate in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service. But that’s what happened. Her writing schedule for Bleacher Report had her producing content throughout the week, so she added a “Dana and Parker project” as her Sunday “story.”

Each week, she planned to sit down and write a card, but first things first.

“What was I going to say to them?” she thought. “I never met Parker, but I wanted them to know that I was praying for him and thinking about them, and I started mailing these cards each week.”

Unfortunately, Parker passed away in January 2015 at age 15.

“I cried,” Amy said. “I was feeling the loss on a deeply personal level and, I was just sending cards sort of randomly. So, I went back to church and asked myself, ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’ And I decided that I was going to keep writing to Dana.”

For the next four months, Amy faithfully sent a note to Dana each week. More often than not, the letters included a sports reference as far as how LSU or Texas Tech teams were doing.

By this time, Amy was living in Dayton, Ohio, where she was happy to tell anyone who would listen that she was a graduate of “The” Texas Tech University, a good-natured shot over the bow of all the surrounding full-throated supporters of “The” Ohio State University.

One day, she wandered out to her mailbox and, much to her delight, discovered a letter from Dana. This was not just some quickly crafted thank-you note, either. It took a little effort to heft it from the mailbox. 

Upon opening it, Amy found an emotional manifesto, eight pages painstakingly written, outlining the grief and loss Dana had experienced, what she had been through and how she was feeling as a result.

That letter became the catalyst for the two women and an exclusive back-and-forth letter-writing relationship spanning over the next two years. Now they were pen pals connected by grief at one end and understanding at the other.

“Reconnecting with Amy was an unexpected gift,” Dana said. “When the letters first started, I was surprised, but as each week passed, I realized I depended on them in a way I never expected. The fact that she thought enough of me to write weekly gave me a comfort I hadn’t realized I needed.

“My relationship with Amy taught me that friendship, no matter how brief the initial relationship, can be the thing that gets you through the hard days. Knowing she was there for me really made a difference.”

Amy’s notes always underscored her support for Dana from afar while Dana shared the raw emotions caused by the roller coaster of grief. She was a mother who had lost a child, and she was working through a lot. In a manner of speaking, it was Amy who was there for her.

“We just trusted each other to the point of telling each other everything,” Amy said. 

It was special for Dana as well.

“Reconnecting is powerful, and I would tell people if you think of someone often that you’ve lost touch with, reach out,” Dana said. “Reconnecting with Amy not only made a huge difference in my life, but my family’s as well. Her family is now ‘our’ family, and I can’t imagine life without them.”

For Amy, the letters back and forth with Dana slowly coalesced into something bigger that she wanted to take on.

That’s when she decided to start writing to her friends.

“I realized I’d had this intense, incredibly intimate relationship with this person for two years,” she said, “and I thought, if this can happen with one random woman who lives in Louisiana and likes LSU, then what about all these other people in my life?”

Writing was in her DNA

Not only did Amy write the letters, but she also kept notes about what was going on inside of her, a parallel initiative recording her own emotions and thoughts as this one-person campaign of encouragement continued to unfold. She found herself not only sharing genuine emotions, but also being touched by them as well. The more fond memories she accumulated, the more certain she became that she might have the makings of a uniquely compelling story.

The result was her book, “Dear Dana: That Time I Went Crazy and Wrote All 580 of my Facebook Friends a Handwritten Letter.” The labor of love was published to rave reviews in 2022. The work marks her second book, following “You Cannot Mess This Up: A True Story That Never Happened,” which was published in 2019 to similarly positive feedback.

The first book, as they say, is always the toughest for a lot of reasons, including the author’s own headspace struggles.

“I had never written a book or been trained to be a writer,” she said. “So, what was I even doing? I was way out of my league.”

The misgivings vanished early, thanks to the positive reinforcement from her publisher, who assured her she did indeed have a readable product on her hands, a real-life book that other people would purchase to read.

Color Amy appropriately astonished by that development.

“Slowly, over a long period of time, I began to accept that, much to my surprise, I had been a writer all along,” she said.

In the days since, she also has added another unexpected title to her repertoire: motivational speaker. She now regularly shares her story (and the stories that have emerged from it) with appreciative audiences.

“One part of doing all of this was absolute gratitude,” she said. “Looking back, I was thinking how God just absolutely knocked it out of the park for me, relationally speaking.”

The point of connection with each friend was an easy place to start. Amy could mentally scroll through the snapshots of her life and remember something about every one of them. 

She wanted the notes to be more than just a note from some voice of the past, which required thinking and planning. She did not want the letters to lose their impact after an opening salutation. 

“I thought about what I was going to say to this random list of people, this treasure trove of actual relationships,” she said.

Of course, compelling writing often relies upon a less-is-more approach. Amy often led with gratitude and followed with compassion. It was the one-two punch of appreciation landing with an unsuspecting recipient. 

She handed out a thank-you here, a congratulations there, and regularly assured friends dealing with loss that she was aware of what was taking place in their life and thinking about them.

Unsurprisingly, Amy got much more out of the undertaking than she put in. 

“I found out so much, but over and over again, I realized that it is never, ever, ever too late to tell another human being that you care about them,” she said.

The Texas Tech factor

To this day, Amy believes Texas Tech professors pushed her to reach higher, to expect more and to work harder than she thought possible. 

The payoff, besides a diploma, was the way her personal expectations of significant accomplishment crystallized. 

“I believe the faculty members at Texas Tech raised my expectations in a foundational way,” she said. “For me personally, to have been taken seriously by the faculty at Texas Tech as a high school graduate with no experience also made me take myself seriously. If this accomplished, esteemed group of leaders would take time to teach, listen and guide me, then maybe I had something in me of value.”

That’s not all Texas Tech gave her. It planted the seeds of grit, determination and encouragement within her.

“Being at Texas Tech always made me feel like I was a part of something bigger,” she said. “Like I was part of an extended, unexpected family that was there to support and love me, that my fellow Red Raiders and I were there together with a common purpose.

“Thirty-five years later, I still feel that way.”