Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

I'm excited to announce a new zine project from Teeny Tiny Press called Thank You . Using the classic Teeny Tiny format of an eight-page, single-sheet zine, Thank You collects a series of thank you notes in the form of poems and very short prose. Issue one includes work (in alphabetical order!) from Maura Alia Badji, X.P. Callahan, Del Ray Cross, Laura-Marie River Victor Nopales, BT Shaw, Eileen Tabios, and Mandy Zeller. To launch this zine, I'm doing a month-long fundraising drive (Aug 9-Sept 10) for Treehouse, a Seattle-based organization that helps kids and young adults in foster care. This is part of a larger back to school fundraising drive from Treehouse. They help kids with clothes, school supplies, books, toys, and much more. If you want a copy of the zine, donate an amount of your choice to Treehouse via https://engage.treehouseforkids.org/teenytinypress , and send me an email or instagram message with your mailing address. Then I'll send you the zine! Thank...

I had to cancel the Only Connect class that I was going to run from mid-May to mid-June. In the few years that have passed since I last offered an independently-run online writing class, the world of online classes has changed a lot. Pretty much any class you'd want to take online is available now because of the shift to online since the pandemic began. So it's a lot harder as an instructor to enroll enough students to run an online class since there are a huge amount of options now--and people are also experiencing fatigue with being online, whereas before an online creative writing class was more of a novelty. As for the update, I decided to shift toward offering individualized work with writers instead. I plan to build a new website in the weeks ahead and post more information about this. I'm offering individualized feedback and writing assignments for anyone who wants to work one on one with me on their writing. If this is something that interests you, please zip m...

In the year or so since I've posted to this blog, I've had a handful of poems published online that I can link to here. Eratio published four of my poems that combine found text from the New King James translation of the Bible with some autobiographical reflections. I also had a poem in Impossible Archetype , a cool PDF-format journal that focuses on work from LGBTQ+ writers. And finally, one of my poems appears in Red Eft Review , a straightforward journal that reminds me of classic lit zines like Nerve Cowboy and Right Hand Pointing . My work was also recently included in some print publications that aren't available online: Crosscurrents , Gold Man Review , and Sinister Wisdom . Maybe listing these publications will encourage me to send work out more--or maybe even to get to work on one of my own zines again. I'm posting to the blog again because I've just put together a new online writing class, with prompts meant to appeal to both poets and prose writers. ...

I said I can't write lately, and someone said it's writer's block, but it's not. It's more like, well, I could sit down and write, but it feels meaningless and small. Of course, writing has always felt small to me on some level, or I wouldn't have focused on all things teeny tiny. Surely I'll return to some "small but mighty" writing and publishing projects soon (as a friend kindly described them years ago). I was grateful to be able to raise a couple hundred dollars for Immigrant Families Together with my last tiny zine. I have an idea for a new zine that will tell the story a new online friend shared with me about her work with recent immigrants in New Mexico. If I didn't believe in the power of writing, I wouldn't spend my life teaching college students how to write in clearer and more focused ways. And it's a privilege to have the time and ability to write, and the access to a computer and a printer and an internet connection. But...

Well, I did end up raising over $200 with my Well, It's a Job zine! It was really exciting to be able to donate that much money to Immigrant Families Together. Thank you to everybody who donated. And I still have copies of the zine, so if you or someone you know would like a copy, you can still use the PayPal link that's included in the earlier blog posts to order one. I'm working on another fundraising zine now, this one with poems based on my own experience rather than emerging from found text. I've chosen all the poems and just need to write a little intro part and do the layout. I want to get this done in time for tabling at an upcoming book fair at the Washington State History Museum on April 6. I'll post about it on the blog, too, of course! The title is Some Poems for the End of the World . By the way, I'm not putting out a call for submissions for content for zines because I need to keep things small/manageable, but I do want to keep making these fund...

Thanks to everyone who has donated and/or shared info about my zine fundraiser for Immigrant Families Together so far. I just made a donation at the IFT GoFundMe site for $110, bringing the total to $165. Maybe the zine will cross the $200 mark over the next few days. I hope so! Here's the link if you want to donate and receive a copy of Well, It's a Job for your own zine-reading pleasure. (Recommended donation amount is $2 to $10.) I've been busy making more copies. I've also been thinking about finding an event where I can table with the zines, so please let me know if you have any ideas. I could just set up with a TV tray somewhere around town at a community event (I have a pretty cool vintage TV tray, in fact). When I think about what's happening to people--and especially kids--at the hands of our government, I feel small. And I feel very, very angry. I was heartened when I learned about Immigrant Families Together because it is a group of individuals...