The Letters series originated when Yousefian began to go through her boxes of letters more than a decade ago. At the time, the artist re-read many of the letters and discovered how much they conveyed, not only the news of people and events back in Iran, but also how she had processed or understood them at an earlier age. They became part of her story, history, and memories, but the physical letters simply resided in a box under her bed as a personal archive. She began to cut up the letters, not as a destructive act, but rather as an attempt to seek their essence and find a meaningful association with the words penned on paper. Yousefian began to find and cut the most important, and powerful parts—as if an act of therapeutic recovery. After some time passed, she revisited the fragments of the letters, and decided to incorporate them into her art.

These original letters (uncopied and unscanned) are correspondences between the artist and her friends and relatives in Iran after her immigration to the United States. At that time, writing letters was still the most practical way to keep in touch with those back home. Letters, lovingly written by hand, conveyed intense emotions, reflected both the pain of separation and the joy of achievement and growth. The contemplative and slow medium of hand-written letters now appear as nostalgic objects from the past, both a historical pre-Internet past, but also a personal past in another time and place. The fragments of these letters, originally in Persian, are cut up in such a way that they are no longer distinct or legible but are the distillation of the feelings and sentiments from one person to another. Letters are carefully cut by hand and mounted on wood by glue or with nails. Some of the letters are dyed in tea, coffee, wine, and soy sauce to convey the warmth of the emotions. Other letters in this series are those penned by Yousefian and sent back to Iran. In these letters, Yousefian used no dye, and simply cut and mounted the blue handwriting on white paper to show the effect of her own emotions and moods as she adjusted to a new location and culture. By cutting these letters into fragments and rearranging them in minimal compositions, Yousefian at once, destroyed and preserved these valuable objects; she not only highlights their meaning as part of her life as an artist, but also wants the viewer to experience the distortions and reinventions of an immigrant archive.