M I E L

MIEL wants your work if it is intelligent. If it feels. If it wants a new language to speak from, in, and with. I want your work with gaps in it. I want your work about your invisible or barely visible life. I want your work that struggles. I want your work that demands a book form to accommodate it. I want your long poems, your fragments, your most bare articulations and your exorbitant ones. I want a bright pink language, a gold language, a deep blue language and a stark one.

MIEL aims to bridge the artist’s book and the trade edition. We make books that are objects, too: good to touch, good to look at, good to read. We make our own books, sometimes. We make what we please and what pleases us.

I believe in the value of things made with intention and desire for beauty.
I want to see a beauty we never knew existed until you gave it to us.
I believe ‘beauty’ is mutable and found in places we don’t know about yet.
I want to be taken to those places.
I believe in situating.
I believe in language.
I believe in difficulty as a way of creating sense, not for its own sake.

I want boundary-crossing, discipline-mixing,
expectation-confounding work.
I want to read writing containing its own question.
I want intense thought, intertextuality, a nuanced
understanding of form, compassion, capability.
I want love for subject and object.

I believe in the wide, wide availability of art
and of the means of making art.

I am especially interested in putting my time and money
behind work by women, people of color, and queer people.

I like Anne Carson, Jacques Derrida, C.D. Wright, Gabriela Mistral, Karen Tei Yamashita, Fanny Howe, Myung-Mi Kim, Kiki Smith, William Kentridge, Maggie Nelson, Anne Boyer, Lydia Davis, Julie Otsuka, Simone White, W. G. Sebald.

MIEL will consider photographs, drawings, etchings, poetry, and prose for publication. MIEL produces books in editions of between 100 and 250. Authors are paid in copies (10-20% of print run, depending on edition; usually about 20 copies) and, in exceptional circumstances, a small honorarium.

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I encourage women writers, non-binary writers, trans writers, and writers of color to send work.

I am looking for work that is experimental or conceptual without a disregard for embodiment.

I am looking for work that is socially aware and alive.

I am looking for work that feels like springtime.

I would love to see work about faith, religion, science, nature, history, power, philosophy, politics, art.

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Thank you for considering sending your work to MIEL.