About Postmarked Stories

Letters, slowly, by mail.

Postmarked Stories is a small publisher of immersive subscription fiction. Each season is a finite, twelve-month novel told through letters and keepsakes mailed to subscribers, one envelope at a time, on roughly the same date each month, for a year.

We make the kind of story that takes its time.

The first season: The Linden Lane Letters

Elizabeth is sixty-five. Her husband Walter died sixteen months ago, and she has left her old life behind to move to the small town of Whitfield, to be near her daughter Lila and her two grandsons. The house she has bought is below market and as-is. The kitchen has not been touched since she was born. The attic is full of trunks and dressmaker’s dummies and stacks of old magazines, and tucked under the round window, against the far wall, sits a small wooden chest with a brass lock for which there is no key.

When Elizabeth finds the key, she finds the diary of a young woman named Eleanor Mae Hollis, who died in October 1929 under circumstances the town of Whitfield has been telling itself a polite lie about for ninety-seven years.

The further she reads, the less the lie holds.

For twelve months, Elizabeth writes to you about it. About her week, her town, her growing book club of widows, her budding romance, and the keepsakes of a hundred-year-old mystery slowly opening: a pressed flower from her garden, a recipe card, a reproduction of a 1929 newspaper clipping, a photograph, a ticket stub. One in every envelope.

After the twelfth letter, the story is complete. There is no thirteenth envelope. There is no thirteenth charge.

A note from the founder

I am Andrew. I started Postmarked Stories because the mailbox used to mean something, and I missed that. I missed the kind of story that takes its time, and the kind of envelope you do not throw away.

I read every word Elizabeth writes before it goes in the post. I sign the founding-subscriber thank-you cards by hand. I answer the email myself. If something is off, a letter lost, a keepsake bent, a date that slipped, write to me, and I will fix it.

The Linden Lane Letters is our first season. Future seasons will travel to other places, other times, other kinds of stories. But always told the same way: slowly, by mail, over a year.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Andrew, Founder, Postmarked Stories