For six years and counting, we — Jody and Zoë — have been sending each other love notes: epistolary poems, long form emails with subject lines like “sexy and dorky and overflowing and gay,” texts about magnolia blooms and puppy toe beans, many selfies, one renga, and a lot of Audre Lorde.

We met via a virtual writing workshop in 2018; we have yet to meet in person. This queer bloom of a friendship — perennial yet distanced, intimate yet nebulous — is part of a long-standing tradition. Queer folks have been keeping each other company on the page for as long as we’ve existed — as a way to practice solidarity, to extend generosity, to resist, to wonder, to gossip, to flirt, to nurture kinship beyond borders and categories.

These exchanges hold space for something essential in our intimacies. As Madeleine Cravens writes, “The ‘you’ of the letter poem is never universal. It is vivid, particular, and far-off. It follows that the epistolary poem itself has an urgent function: it must bridge a gap.”

To us, the queer epistolary is a reverent space: a gap in which to witness each other’s vivid, unruly particularities. A bridge between articulation and action. An intimacy that can hold fear and anger and the exhaustion of trying, so that we may, in turn, meet each other off the page, in struggle. Queer as in making room for reverence and revolutionary insistence, both.

In the spirit of that mess and togetherness, here are some examples of queer epistolaries we’re reading:

• June Jordan’s letters to Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, grappling with Zionism, the rifts it caused in their friendships, Jordan’s uncompromising commitment to Palestinian life and liberation
• Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s email correspondences, two lightning weeks of courtship via commentary on touch, gender, media and culture, sex, philosophy
• Claudia Jones’ odes to friends and comrades, speaking directly via poetry to women in prison, in Communist organizations, in anti-colonial movements around the world
• George Abraham and Sarah Aziza’s exchange of kinship, wit(h)ness, love, from within the reach of ongoing personal and collective apocalypse
• Bahar Orang’s profound meditation on beauty, medicine, an address to the beloved, a footnote to the universe about the edges of things

For this folio, we want all of your reaches across space and time. What exchanges are you tending to? Which elders or ancestors breathe with you on and off the page? What love letters to comrades have you penned recently? What open letters to the collective? We want all of your queer bridges.

We are particularly interested in entanglement, collaborative dreaming, decolonial and co-constituted world building, odes to other-than-human kin, and eco-queer futures. We are interested in the ways epistolary forms can speak back to power, to create just and joyful worlds on the page, and get to the mess, the conflict, too. We want your flirts, your offerings, your tips, your tea. We want it all — all your love, in all its forms.

in care and solidarity,

Zoë & Jody

Forms we welcome: poems, essays, emails, texts, voice notes, collages, songs, handwritten notes/cards, photos and image descriptions — any form your correspondences take. These can be duets, collectives, group chats, or solos (aka, collaborations welcome but not necessary).

Deadline: March 15, 2025
Email: queerepistolaries@gmail.com

Call for Work: Until You Get Here, Queer Epistolaries was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.