Skip to main content

Goodbye, Summer

It's sunny this morning as I look out the window, but it's supposed to return to heavy rain later. I guess we have to admit that the long, long summer is finally over. It was the perfect Seattle summer for me--sunny, but not too hot. I took the picture above at Lopez Island in June. The Spencer Spit state campground there is great: you can camp right at the beach. Not that I can say I'm a real camper, but hey, I did stay at two different campgrounds this summer.

I started working on some poems inspired by camping/backcountry hiking manuals and really should return to working on them. Here's one of those poems. Thanks to NAP for originally publishing it.

Sharing Your Gear

You plan to walk together
at the same pace, but what if

you get separated? Carry gear
you can use by yourself

just in case--the person with the tent
has poles and all; the person

with soup has a pot. Before you marry
your skillet to your partner's stove

commit to staying together
the length of the trip.

Comments

wendy lee lynds said…
i admit it.
i have goosebumps!
yes, to this poem.
(especially about camping - you adventuresome you!)
Amanda Laughtland said…
Thanks for the comment! I really like the new layout of your website. :)

Popular posts from this blog

Medium.com as a Place to Self-Publish (Kinda)

I started writing on Medium.com in late September of 2021, so I've been writing on the platform for eight full months now. Before I started on the site as a writer, I'd seen Medium articles come up in Google searches now and then, or my students had sometimes referred to articles in their papers. And I'd seen a couple YouTube videos about how Medium pays writers for their writing. Finally I decided to give it a try when I discovered that a lot of people read and share poetry on Medium. I thought it might be a fun way to find a new audience for my work and to meet other writers who are interested in different modes of self-publishing. It's not easy to get paid for your written work as a poet, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities on Medium. Medium is sort of a hybrid situation in terms of self-publishing. When you post work there, you still own the copyright. But instead of hosting the work on your own website or sharing it in a book or zine ...

New Zine and a Fundraiser for Kids in Foster Care

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...

New Zine Coming, and a Chapbook from a Friend

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...