Editor’s Note
HONG KONG, JULY 2022Welcome to another volume of The Bureau Dispatch—this one marks our first fifty contributors: fifty stories, fifty inventories, fifty photographs of writers and their workspaces. When I first conceived of the idea of a journal that celebrates the working writer, I never imagined the kind of love that it would receive from the writing community. Thank you so much for your support.
In the first two volumes, we looked at the link between writer and writing; in Volume 03: Dear X we focus on epistolary writing and found things, with stories, inventories, and photographs from sixteen phenomenal writers.
Also: in this quarter’s Correspondence, I write to Matt Bell, author of the New York Times Notable Book Appleseed and craft book Refuse to Be Done. We talk about seedlings and Grandma’s apple trees; the last meals of megafauna; and growing roots and moving on.
Last but not least, Volume 04 will open for submissions on August 1st. If you have a story, I'd love to read it.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, MARCH 2022It's been a busy quarter. Volume 01: The Bureaus launched with a level of enthusiasm from the writing community that completely blew me away (thank you!) and when the call went out for the second volume, the submission queue promptly exploded with stories. Something about the idea of trying to capture a sense place in a medium defined by its placelessness seemed to resonate in our increasingly uncertain world.
Volume 02: Dispatch continues to examine the link between writer and writing, with short stories, excerpts, and photographs from sixteen extraordinary writers.
In these stories there is love, longing, heartbreak, and humor. We look at the notion of distances and how we bridge them: there’s the distance between characters and place—such as in Aubrey Hirsch's Among the Stars and Chloe N. Clark's The Day Lasts Longer the Further Away You Are; there’s the distance between loved ones—such as in Joy Guo's Mothers-in Law, Meg Pokrass's This is Our City, Thu Anh Nguyen's I Have to Leave So That I Can Return, and Hananh Yang's Vocabulary Lesson; there’s the distance between time and memory, such as in Cathy Ulrich's Love Songs for Ghosts, Peter Witte's Storytime?, Amy Cipolla Barne's Farm Reports, and Nick Olson's May You / Live In / Interesting Times. There are stories that are so compelling and unique that I'd insta-accepted them when they appeared in my inbox—such as Tanya Žilinskas's Two Knocks, Chin-Sun Lee's Soon You'll Be Just Like Us, Maria Haskin's The Parlor, Aaron Burch's bonus scene from Year of the Buffalo, and Chris Panatier's Internet Review from a Vampire.
I have also had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Christopher James, founder and editor of Jellyfish Review, in a quarterly series called Correspondence. We talk in detail about his bureau, and, of course, jellyfish.
Last but not least, Volume 03 will open for submissions on April 1st, with an editorial focus on epistolary stories. If you have a story, I'd love to read it.
In the mean time, happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, JANUARY 2022There have been changes at home and at work, and like many of the contributors to this first volume of The Bureau Dispatch, I’ve had to find new ways (and places) to write. The dining table and the creaky IKEA desk in the study have been overrun by our kids, stranded at home (and bouncing off the walls) because school has moved online until further notice. In fact, I’m writing this letter on a plastic tray attached to the steering wheel of a car parked beside two inquisitive cats. It’s the only place I can write these days. I haven’t seen wild boars in a while, but I recently wrote about them here.
TBD began with a question: How do other writers do it?
To answer that question, I reached out to a group of amazing writers with a request: send a photograph of themselves in their writing space, an inventory of up to ten things on their desks, and a 250-word unpublished micro or excerpt of something they’re currently working on.
It has been my great privilege shaping TBD with these wonderful writers. Volume 01 feels a little like alchemy, a little bit of mad science—we don’t know what we’ll find when we combine these ingredients. But if I were to try and put it into something pithy, Volume 01 might be an exploration of the link between the writer and the act of writing; a humble attempt to bottle that fleeting sense of place through a medium defined by its placelessness.
Volume 02: Dispatch is scheduled to be published in April 2022, and will have a tighter narrative focus and longer pieces. I’m thrilled with the wildly enthusiastic response so far—if you have a story, consider submitting it here.
Finally, it is my hope that TBD will inspire those of us who wrestle daily with the craft of fiction, and remind us that there are others out there, day and night, similarly hunched over their bureaus: toiling, honing, dispatching their words into the ether.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
Jiksun Cheung is EIC of The Bureau Dispatch and writes speculative short fiction out of Hong Kong. His stories are published in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere, and have received nominations for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Microfiction, and The Shirley Jackson Award. He and his wife share their home with two boisterous toddlers and enough play dough to last a lifetime.
Find him on Twitter @JiksunCheung and jiksun.com.