Dear X,
Back when we used to write, back and forth, you and I, we could fight as comrades. We could hold two futures in hot proximity. We could spark.
And since? You last wrote me about the cruel attention economy, the evaporation of our dear public and its bitter residue. You feared words were now too cheap to transact anything of value, that ethics had devoured strategy in the womb, that luck was running out.
I tried to reassure you that a lonely body in the cold predawn, waiting for the bus back to a job they hate or rocking a child back to sleep or keeping watch behind a doomed barricade, still wants the courage and comfort of the dare imagine, the don’t give in, a common treasure, the dream again.
But you were already gone by then.
And so, with your terraced grin in mind we asked our fellow exiles to send us letters, addressed to a person lost, like me or you. We asked them to keep their missives short enough for six stops on the grinding train, the two last cigarettes ahead of quitting, the awkward wait before the first meeting of a new group that maybe, just maybe, this time… A letter like that one well-loved lighter you for years kept ready to ignite a spell for the gloom, a joint in the pain, a cocktail flashing in our arc of history.
I can remember you saying epistle, like the name of a gun or the ovary of a flower, lifting. I can hear you saying missive, whose siblings are mission and missile and emissary.
Can it be beautiful? Always and only if it’s also fierce and true.
Who’s it for? Oh, for me and you and me and you.
Please come back.
Yours, X
ps. 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.
