Dead Letter Office

Don’t fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

~ Camille Claudel

…it is a fine consolation among the absent that if one who is loved is not present, a letter may be embraced instead.

~ Isidore of Seville

Dead Letter Office(opens in new tab) publishes smaller works — minigraphs — of anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 words, representing work that has either has gone nowhere or will likely go nowhere. The emphasis is on the long essay or short book that can find no welcoming harbor because it is too long for a journal and too short for a scholarly press, and yet there are inkdrops of possibility and the darkling shape of a more full-bodied work.

Dead Letter Office also fosters work that never fully “arrives” in all senses of the term: the conference or seminar paper that will never become a finished article, whether too short or too long, the stray pages for a half-baked article that will never become the full-baked article, the half-finished chapter that will never make it into any book, the notes and semi-polished pages for manuscripts that feel unfinish-able, the prospectus for the project you can never seem to find your way to start, the prolegomenon and preamble without follow-up, the stray children of your pen, the letter you wrote then tucked away in a drawer, fearing to mail it, or the one you sent and received again with the stamp “return to sender,” or which was never received nor returned, that you perhaps lost and then re-found.

We also seek experiments in whimsy, in over-reaching, in idle speculation, in prospecting for fool’s gold, in working molehills into mountains, in marking and then forgetting a path in a wild wood of visible darkness. We want articles that are too long for journals and books that are too short to be called monographs. In short, the Dead Letter Office invites you to take your L/letters out of the drawer, or shoebox, or closet, or attic, or hard drive, to re-visit and re-polish, without worrying about conclusions or ultimate destinations, and send them to us. We also invite work whose genre is so un-classifiable, it is often declared “Dead On Arrival” in the more traditional academic publishing houses.

The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.

~ Heather Love

We will also consider actual letters to the dead: belated eulogies, posthumous transmissions to the underworld, love (and hate and other) missives to the departed, funerary telegrams, postcards from the edge, manuals for griefbots, last rites, and various notes and commentaries to be used as devices to water the graveyards where, to cadge from Walter Benjamin, some of the dead are turning by a strange heliotropism toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history.

If interested in submitting a book manuscript to Dead Letter Office, send a query email to Eileen at eileen@punctumbooks.com with a very brief description of the book and we will let you know if we want to see the full manuscript during punctum’s regular open review period, which is May to July each year, and you can see those submission guidelines HERE(opens in new tab).