In this day and age, writing morally calls for recognising that every sentence is written inside a burning house. To write anyway is not an act of purity but an act of responsibility. It is not putting out the fire, but bearing witness to its heat, its smoke, and the people trapped inside.
What began as an unsuspecting blog page, advertising itself as ‘the letters page for a journal that doesn’t yet exist‘, soon morphed into a professionally produced journal of which every page was a letters page.
Letters are important to our latest contributor, Rachael Smart. So much so, that she will send them even when she’s unsure whether they will ever reach their intended addressee. When I ask who received her most recent missive, she reveals that it was Dolgellau, a mountain town in Wales. Or, at least, she hopes it was received.
Alan Cleaver’s latest book Postal Paths reads like a heartfelt letter to a world that is quietly slipping away: the tactile world of envelopes, stamps, and the steady steps of our rural ‘posties’, writes The Letter Page’s Maria Rocha.
When Harriet outlined the stepping stones of her early publishing career, she described its trajectory as ‘very much Letters Page, internship, assistant role’.
All Zoom meetings start with a slight pause as the microphone connects, and a relief when you can see each other on-screen and hear each other clearly. This was the only pause in my conversation with Harriet Dunlea, as we talked about university, The Letters Page and all things publishing.
Harriet worked as a student on The Letters Page in 2015, and is now Head of Books at Carver PR. She remembers learning about The Letters Page in a lecture and ‘feeling really, really happy when I got it because it was tangible experience that I get to do in Nottingham, where there aren’t that many opportunities to do publishing work experience.’
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