Dead Letter Office: A newsletter for Victoria Raschke

Greetings during the Janus month

Victoria Raschke — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:52:56 +0000

Hello reader friends,

It’s been a minute, but I’m not going to promise any regular pattern from here. Life is messy and the world is in chaos in so many heavy ways. And despite—or maybe because of my absence from big social media—I still exist and am trying to create in this swirl of madness. (I do lurk on BlueSky and post regularly on Mastodon if you find yourself in either of those places @vvitchtoria at both.)

Previously

I do love that it gives that almanac vibe.

In May, I finished A Witch’s Book of Days and sent that off to my new publisher, Crossed Crow Books. It is part commonplace book, part perpetual calendar, and part ritual companion for the year. Pre-ordering is available now through the publisher and hopefully soon through all other retail channels. If you think you’d like a copy of your own, please consider pre-ordering as those purchases help the publisher gage interest in the book.

I took a bit of a hiatus from writing and the U.S. and spent a month in England first walking the Winchester to Canterbury pilgrimage with my sister and a friend and then on an extended road trip through southern England and into Wales with my partner. Highlights included spending a rainy day in Chawton and visiting Jane Austen’s house there, finding blue plaques and church pews and statues dedicated to writers sprinkled everywhere we walked or stopped, seeing narrow boats on the canals, art installations in unexpected places, gardens in late summer bloom, and what I have only half jokingly referred to as the scones and sticky toffee pudding tour. People say the food in UK is bad, but clearly you can find bad food anywhere. You can of course follow Mark Twain’s advice on eating breakfast at every meal, or hit up a tea room for scones and savory pies, or find the local Indian or Turkish takeaway. Fish and chips is also tied with chicken tikka as the national dish for a reason.

Onward

Back from what is probably the last “big trip” for a while, I am at my desk again writing, publishing, and podcasting.

1000Volt Press published the follow up to Yvonne Aburrow’s Changing Paths, Pagan Roots. It looks at terms and concepts from pre-Christian religion and how those got ported into Christianity and how and why a modern pagan can reclaim them. In February, we are releasing Cathy Lynn’s debut novella The Keeper & the Mermaid, a contemporary fantasy set in the Florida Keys. It will be ebook only and is the first of a trilogy of novellas. A collected print edition will be available later this year. As keifel and I have both been swamped, these will be the only releases this year from 1000Volt.

The cover art is a painting by Lydia Knox

Cover design by Nicole Noel & keifel a. agostini

The WitchLit podcast continues in an altered format and cadence. We’ve moved to a monthly release and rather than just talking writing and their latest book with my guest, they choose a classic “witch lit” book by a dead author for us to read and discuss. Recent guests include Cassandra Snow (Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom), Judika Illes (The Master and Margarita), folklorist Mark Norman (The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor), and Thumper Forge (Raymond Buckland’s Cardinal’s Sin). In February, steampunk fantasy author Anne Renwick is joining me to discuss Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. You can subscribe to the podcast at all fine podcatchers or listen on our website.

I am slowly typing away on a book for Llewellyn Worldwide that I probably won’t have information on until next year. I have a chapter in an anthology currently under review that deals with the folk practices and magic to be found in antiquarian household management books. I’ll share more on the status of that when I know it. The follow up to Verona Green, Mummy Brown, is slated for next year, as soon as I get the current manuscript off to my editor. I had to put it on the back burner when I sold A Witch’s Book of Days and the current Llewellyn project but I am itching to get back to Verity and her plants and paints.

Out and about, what I’m reading

If you are the pagan/witchcraft/occult conference going sort, I’ll be attending Between the Worlds/Sacred Space in Baltimore in February. I’m on a panel at Paganicon in Minneapolis in March, and I hope to be at the Salem Witchcraft and Folklore Festival in August. I am also looking at a few local writing or witchy events in the Bay Area but I don’t have solid dates on those yet. There will also be some book launch events in September when A Witch’s Book of Days is released but, again, no details yet.

And lastly, I am currently rereading the aforementioned Hound of the Baskervilles, catching up on Anne Renwick’s latest, just finished listening to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. All of which I can recommend, the Kim Stanley Robinson especially if you need a dense book that offers a not-bleak peek into the future.

Remember there are more of us than them. Take care of yourselves and each other and thank you as always for joining me on this journey.

<3 V

Acknowledge the chaos, make art

Victoria Raschke — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:19:00 +0000

It’s been a minute, after I said I’d try to show up in this space more regularly. Then things happened, a member of our household was injured in a way that impacted their mobility (they are better now), multiple wars waged in horrific ways (that’s still happening), there was an election, there was a long holiday season far way from my larger family and my circle of friends laced with the dread of what might be coming, then friends worrying about their house burning down, then an inauguration, and an unraveling with friends losing jobs, queer and trans friends fearing for their safety and that of their children, immigrant friends worried about their standing and safety, and foreign friends asking me, are you okay, should you leave?

And I’ve had a lot of mornings where I sit at my desk, staring out the window at the crows on the power lines, the neighbor’s cypress trees blowing in the California winter wind and rain and at the slowly greening Diablo mountains in the distance, wondering who could possibly care if I finish this book that isn’t suppose to come out until 2026? Who is going to listen to a podcast about writing when their world is collapsing around them? I use to remind myself of the meaning of art with a story that Neil Gaiman told about women reading secreted books in the Nazi concentration camps of WWII. The story still stands but the source of it has been another loss, another disappointment, another ally who turned out to be anything but.

That story has been joined by reminders from other writers and creators—friends and strangers—that art matters. It is often the thing that gets us through the hardest times and the collapse, and gives us something to look forward to on the other side and ideas about what to build on the remains. Even writers whose work is full of warnings like Octavia Butler in the Parable of the Sower (* affiliate links for Bookshop . org) and the Parable of the Talents*, weave hope about our adaptability and survival in the face of catastrophe. If you haven’t read those books, they might be hard slogs right now but they are also worth a read or a listen. Kim Stanley Robinson is another far-seeing author with provocative things to say about where we are and what the future* could look like. I think often now of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash* and how tech oligarchs have seen it as a blueprint and not the caution I took it as when I read it thirty years ago and again last year. I know there are more. If you share yours with me, I’ll share them next time.

A friend asked recently (was December recent?) if I had read Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead*, a quirky murder mystery by Polish Noble Prize Laureate Olga Tokarczuk. I listened to it last year and it was undoubtedly my favorite read of 2024. Yes, people die in it, but it is still escapist in a way that British village murder mysteries are, and I always think now about washing my feet before I go to bed. So share your escapist reads or podcasts or music, paintings too. Art may be what gets us through, but community is what helps us survive. We save each other.

I hope you have community and I hope you are safe and have what you need and can help those around you feel safer and have what they need. I am currently safe and have what I need, and despite my brain’s willingness to doomscroll and catastrophize every thread of news, I am writing. Because it does matter and because it is its own escape for a few hours a day. There is something oddly comforting about research-reading 17th century herbals and Samuel Pepys’ account of the London Fire, or Pliny’s of Pompeii. We have always been adapting and surviving and what that looks like changes as we know more and encounter new delights and horrors.

Thank you for sticking around through the quiet times and continuing on this journey with me. I won’t make promises about any regularity of this missive, but you’ll hear from me here or there will be another book, written in hope if nothing else.

<3 V

Some places in time and space seem to be cauldrons of creativity and I was lucky enough to swim in the soup of one as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. I’ve mentioned that this book was on the horizon but it is out now and I could not be more honored and humbled to find my words among those included in this anthology. If poetry is a joy or an escape for you, I highly recommend it. Available to preorder from Press 53.

Objects in This Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy edited by Danielle Hanson & Julia Beach, cover collage by Kari Harrison

Happy all the holidays season!

Victoria Raschke — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:51:00 +0000

In this season of giving, the authors of A Very Cryptid Christmas Vol. 2 want to give you a giant prize package. The grand prize is an ebook bundle with other books from many of the writers who participated this time and a prize pack of cryptid goodies, including stickers, a tarot deck, a cryptid T-shirt, enamel pins, and more. The runner up will get the ebook bundle, giving you have two chances to win a stuff-your-ereader stash and one chance to win the whole caboodle of cryptid fun. Due to the ridiculous cost of shipping, the grand prize is restricted to U.S. addresses, but the ebook bundle is available for anyone, anywhere. You can enter to win here, and there are ways to get your name in the proverbial hat a few more times to increase your chances of winning.

Part of the grand prize pack.

In other cryptid romance news, the paperback versions of both volumes of A Very Cryptid Christmas are available to order through the usual channels including Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. The ebooks of Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are available on all the platforms too, if you haven’t snagged yours already. And don’t forget you can request ebooks and paperbacks at your local library!

On a completely different note, I know this time of year isn’t all sparkles and happy families for everyone. I tend to the melancholic myself and find the blues surprise me in December as much as the small joys do. I hope you are taking time for yourself, whether that’s cozying up to read with a warm beverage or getting together with the people you can be the most you with. And I hope you find all of the (biodegradable, non-toxic) glitter the season has to offer.

❤️ V