Dead Bird Letters

A series of typographic transcriptions of Alice Sheldon’s Dead Bird Letters. Brittany Nelson commissioned this research and publication as a gallery accompaniment for her show 10,000 Light Years From Home at Patron Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Alice was an American science-fiction writer who cloaked her sexuality in the 1970s by writing male-driven narratives under the male pen name of James Tiptree Jr. Working with Nelson and Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, in Amsterdam, digital scans of a series of hastily handwritten letters from Sheldon were obtained, ‘Tiptree’s Dead Birds.’ Writing the letters as Tiptree, Sheldon details all the women who rejected her in her lifetime. They read as an epitaph to a lifetime of queer isolation. With the original documents subsequently lost, the scans were captured by Nelson as glass plate reflective holographs to replace the physical form of the letters, and a booklet of typeset transcriptions was provided as a window into Sheldon’s alternative universe.

My role included researching and working with Phillips and the University of Oregon’s Special Collections (which houses a wealth of Sheldon’s work and records) to transcribe the nearly illegible original letters hastily handwritten by Alice (writing as Tiptree), which often required decoding pen names used by Sheldon’s close confidants. The final booklet faithfully typesets the letter transcriptions, including Alice’s corrections, omissions, and other annotative marks.

The following shows Brittany’s work as shown at Patron Gallery followed by a side-by-side comparison between Alice’s original letters* and the typographic transcriptions.

* All rights reserved. University of Oregon, Special Collections

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