Vol. 9 (2023): Strange Letters

This special issue of the Swamphen Journal was born from the Strange Letters Symposium held in 2021 when we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. In the Western tradition, people have often turned to letter writing as a means of connection with distant others but this symposium asked us to reimagine the letter for the strange times that we have found ourselves in (for some these strange times began with colonisation). To challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human, seems strangely fitting when the nonhuman is so clearly asking us to listen.