Submissions via Submittable

We only take submissions via Submittable. I’ll be accepting submissions again soon, maybe by October 1, 2023. For those of you with submissions waiting for a response, your time is gonna’ come.

You’ll need a Southern Legitimacy Statement.
Read the Mule for examples. If you’re south of somewhere, you’re Mule material.

Submission to and acceptance by Dead Mule grants us first electronic and indefinite archival rights. All other rights revert to the author upon publication. Please credit Dead Mule as the first publisher if you reprint elsewhere; we like seeing our name in print, too.

We expect your writing to be finished and ready for publication. We don’t run it through a grammar check program. Make sure your work is ready; don’t ask us to let you edit at the last minute due to a misspelled word or other edit. Send us finished work! But then again, we do realize writing is never finished, edits are ongoing and we get at least two requests an issue, if not more, to use a “newer” copy of the submission. We do try to be kind and use the edited copy… but really, ya’ll, try to send us your finished work.

Don’t second guess yourself or your writing. Not trying to be mean but ya’ll really should send completed work. Writers constantly want to update and edit their submitted pieces. This is unprofessional, time-consuming and just wrong.

For Mule Merchandise:

T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs and all, go to our CAFEPRESS store. Any money made off the sale of merchandise pays our server/GoDaddy fees. Trust me, we don’t mark up anything much, so there’s little money to be made. That said, buy a mule shirt, be a cool kid! We occasionally have writing competitions for Dead Mule Mugs. Here’s the link:

Dead Mule Store

Now, for some real information about the Dead Mule, some of the restored database information is easily accessed by traveling over to:

TheDeadMule.wordpress.com

Okay then, see yall in the funny papers. Be sure and read our about page.

-Valerie MacEwan

“No good Southern fiction, poetry or essay is complete without a dead mule.”

Celebrate the Mule! Celebrate the Jackalope, a Southern friend to all. Kinda’ like a bullfrog, it gets into your memory and burrrreeeeps its way out.

Black and white photos: Library of Congress online collection.

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives :: READ ON ::

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, and employed such photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans. The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.

The collection encompasses the images made by photographers working in Stryker’s unit as it existed in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935-1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937-1942), and the Office of War Information (1942-1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and non-governmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations. In total, the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives and transparencies, 1,610 color transparencies, and around 107,000 black-and-white photographic prints, most of which were made from the negatives and transparencies. The collection was transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944.

How the Photographs Were Produced

Although photographers in Roy Stryker’s unit were sent out on assignments throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, the unit’s main office was in Washington, D.C. The office distributed photographic equipment and film, drew up budgets, allocated travel funds, hired staff, developed, printed, and numbered most negatives, reviewed developed film, edited photographers’ captions written in the field, and maintained files of negatives, prints, and captions. The main office also distributed images to newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, and supplied photographs to exhibitions.

Staff photographers were given specific subjects and/or geographic areas to cover. These field assignments often lasted several months. Before beginning their assignments, photographers read relevant reports, local newspapers, and books in order to become familiar with their subject. A basic shooting script or outline was often prepared. Photographers were encouraged to record anything that might shed additional light on the topic that they were photographing, and they received training in making personal contacts and interviewing people.

Most of the time the photographers mailed their exposed negatives to the photographic unit’s lab in Washington for developing, numbering and printing. [View images of the photo lab.] In the initial years of the project Stryker was almost exclusively responsible for reviewing contact prints made from the negatives and selecting images that he considered suitable for printing. Over time, however, photographers played a greater role in picture selection. Rejected images were classified as “killed.” In earlier phases of the project a hole was sometimes punched through the “killed” negatives; later, this practice was abandoned. The rejected images are usually near duplicates and alternate views of a printed negative.

After Stryker reviewed and selected images, the negatives and contact prints (or “first prints”) were returned to the photographers for captioning. The resulting captions were edited at the photographic unit’s headquarters. The selected images were then printed and mounted, the captions were applied to the photo mounts, and the photographs were filed in the photographic unit’s file.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/fsa-owi-black-and-white-negatives/about-this-collection/