I have been a mail artist for many years, and a member of the International Union of Mail Artists since 2016. At one time I had a small private network of paying mail art subscribers in the US, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.
These days, still in the spirit of mail art, I send premiums through the United States Postal Service to Diary Poems paying subscribers.1 I also mail supplementary premiums to special friends and supporters of Diary Poems, whether paying or free subscribers, because they have given me permission to use and display their artwork or personal photographs for ekphrastic and other poems, or because their contributions to comment sections have been especially astute and civil when heated discussion arose in reaction to certain poems.2
Occasionally the recipient of a premium will send me something in return, and that’s always a delight (though it’s certainly never expected, since the premium is itself a gesture of thanks from me). And then there are people whose work comes to me in the mail because I’ve purchased it after seeing it on Substack while browsing through the Notes feature.
Today I want to share work I recently received from three people. In future posts, I will share and discuss work I’ve received from the poets James Maynard and Jonathan Potter, among other Substack writers and artists. I hope this post will serve as an invitation for all of us to consider mail art as a practice, a means of connection, and an outlet for our work.
d.w.
What do we know about the mysterious lowercase, low-profile West Coast writer, cartoonist, and visual artist known as d.w.? We don’t know his given name, but we do know that he goes by kidclampdown on his (private) Instagram account as well as at his website. Born and brought up in New Jersey, d.w. is a cofounder and editor of the comics and art anthology Irene (these bits of information come from the brief author bio that accompanies his 2017 Fantagraphics book Mountebank). For the past three years, d.w. has been publishing the uncommonly erudite and literate Substack newsletter One Could Argue, which he describes as “meditations on what I’m reading and watching.” In exchange for my two recent mini-chapbooks, d.w. sent me multiple copies of two tiny zines along with a mask that doubles as a trippy drawing on polar coordinate paper.
Ann Heilbron
Florida resident Ann Heilbron, painter and self-styled “big, bad voodoo mama,” is active on Instagram as anniemonkee. Ann made an appearance at Diary Poems last March, and the two of us collaborated on Instagram before I moved to Substack. Ann turns up frequently in Diary Poems comment sections. Here is the gorgeous surprise that she mailed me last week in exchange for my latest mini-chapbook.
Kortney Garrison
Without the Notes feature on Substack, I might never have discovered Kortney Garrison, a fine poet from the Pacific Northwest who publishes One Deep Drawer on Substack. Tiny Wren Lit has just published Kortney’s mini-chapbook of thirteen short poems, Every Broken Year: The Persephone Cycle, a retelling of the Greek myth from the standpoint of mother and daughter. Not only is the book a ravishing physical object—5.5 by 3.5 inches, printed on linen, with equally lovely packaging—the poems themselves are often breathtaking (“He was the river I wanted / to wade into,” from “Watching Hades in a Field”). Kortney Garrison is also the author of the chapbook Elemental, published by the fabulous Bottlecap Press.
In January 2024, paying subscribers to Diary Poems were offered Black Shirt Emblazoned, a mini-chapbook of poems whose theme is anti-Semitism, particularly the Jew-hatred that erupted all over the Western world as an immediate and primary response to the Hamas-led genocidal rampage in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Those who became paying subscribers after June 2023 also received a catch-up premium last month—the revised edition of A Party of Another Kind, a mini-chapbook of poems tracing decades of personal and mostly dysfunctional lesbian history, largely recounted in what I like to call “unrhymed truncated Petrarchan sonnets,” which is a pretentious way of saying “eleven-line unrhymed poems of eleven syllables per line.” Both books can be purchased via the foregoing links. All profits from Black Shirt Emblazoned are donated to ZAKA Search and Rescue. Any profits from A Party of Another Kind will fund the production and mailing of further premiums for paying subscribers and other friends of Diary Poems.
Examples of supplementary premiums include this 11 x 17 broadside, which reproduces an oil painting by Pamm Hanson; this one, which reproduces a colored-pencil drawing by Alexis Kane; and this one, which incorporates a family photograph belonging to Mary Holscher. Additional broadside premiums, in various sizes, are in progress for paying subscribers who have already requested them. If you would like a broadside, please send me an email (xpcallahan@substack.com) or let me know in the comments.
Thanks. Because of you I learned a new word today (chapbook). And that "trippy drawing" looks like a mask to me. (my likely irrelevant opinion)
Thank you for including me and for introducing me to the others! Now, I'm off to order a chapbook from Kortney. 🥰