Missive: A Corresponding Society for Revolutionary Ideas and Feeling

MISSIVE, a corresponding society for revolutionary ideas and feeling, welcomes public letters of no more than 2,000 words. These must begin with a salutation and end with a valediction and be addressed to a lost individual (dead? departed? forgotten? misguided?) who need not be named.

We prize work that pushes the boundaries of style so as to make irresistible new, radical thinking about how we can come together in greater numbers and intensity and thereby abolish the systems of domination that negate us, including but not limited to capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and the state. We do not police anything, let alone the border between fact and fiction, poetry and prose, history and (re)memory, hope and heartbreak. But we do celebrate and prioritize writing that is compelling, fierce, evocative and in conversation with the great struggles of our times.

We recognize that many radicals have graduate degrees and feel trapped in universities or their anterooms, and that these institutions have captured many of our words and hopes and paradigms. But we don’t publish jargon or entertain purely academic debates. We don’t do citations or footnotes: name your friends and enemies. We prioritize publishing the letters of people who are not the beneficiaries of patriarchy and empire.

We work at the pace our energies allow, but we intend to publish one letter each month via our email newsletter and on our website. There, missives can also be downloaded as PDFs to print and leave where they will cause the most fuss. We ask all published writers to record themselves reading their work for our podcast, and also to be our guest in what we hope will become a monthly informal online seminars for co-conspirators. Sometimes we even meet in person.

We pay $150 CAD or equivalent to all writers upon publication of their letter and appreciate it when those with means of institutional support donate this back to the common fund.

MISSIVE is an offshoot of VAGABONDS, a series of short radical books from Pluto Press. Both are edited by Max Haiven, with help from some other goblins.