Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

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 ...

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...

Thank you to everyone who has donated to zine fundraiser so far. Since announcing the zine just a day ago, I've been able to raise $50 to give to Immigrant Families Together . I just went to GoFundMe and made what I hope is the first in a series of donations made possible through the community of friends and artists that I feel proud to be part of. If you'd like to share info about the zine fundraiser, please do share my Instagram or blog posts--or create your own post if you like my project and tell people about it via social media, email, etc. I received two donations today directly because of my posts being shared. In particular, I want to say thanks to the Olympia Zine Fest for sharing my post on their Facebook page. I know that a lot of us are feeling disheartened, to say the least, with the political situation in the US, and it feels overwhelming to try and do anything to meaningfully respond to it. So I went back to what I try to do when I feel overwhelmed: I do a ...

I made a new zine! The zine is called Well, It's a Job , and it's a collection of a few of the poems I've written over the last couple years using text from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I wrote these poems by literally cutting up a paperback copy of the book and pasting down bits and pieces from the book with a glue stick. The zine itself is, in classic Teeny Tiny Press format, made from a single sheet of paper folded into eight pages. The actual cut-and-pasted images of the poems were too big to feature in the zine, so I've typed up the poems (though I did cut down one of the poems even more to make it fit onto the last page of the zine). I'm making cardstock covers for the first run of copies of the zine, too, so hurry to order if you want the unique cover. The best part is that I'm selling this zine by donation, with proceeds to benefit Immigrant Families Together , an organization of volunteers who are working to help immigrants who have been d...

I always feel apologetic when I haven't posted to this blog in a long time although I probably should just be apologizing to myself! After all, how can anybody know what I'm teaching or what I've been writing or publishing, etc, if I don't widely share that information? It would take too long to go into everything that's kept me busy since I last posted to this blog. Let me just say that foster parenting has taken up most of my time for the last year and a half: in fact, today marks exactly 18 months since I have been helping to parent for a foster child. It has been a long process involving a lot of love and time and care--and a lot of unknowns. What finally brings me back to the blog is that I'm teaching a workshop called "How to Self-Publish for (Almost) Free" at the 2015 Write on the Sound conference in Edmonds. If you're visiting my blog as a result of attending the workshop, thank you and welcome! I also created an eight-page mini-zine sp...

So I decided to spend some money on myself (a pretty rare thing--I usually only buy myself stuff like secondhand books and thrift store t-shirts), and I'm taking an online collage class with an artist named Randel Plowman. I first learned about his work a few years back from my friend Wendy who referred me to his blog called A Collage a Day . He has written a great collage exercise/workbook, too. And I just plain like his work, which is a good thing to look for in an instructor, I'd say. It's funny because I teach online classes all the time (really the only time I'm not teaching online is for a week or two between quarters), but I've hardly ever taken any classes online. In fact, I can only think of one online class I've taken (which was a class about how to teach online). It's cool to see how someone else teaches an artistic class in an online format. And I've been wanting to take an art class again--it's been several years since I've taken ...

Well, I've been writing in my journal now and then (and writing things for work), but I haven't worked on a poem in a very long time--a few months anyway, but who's counting? I finally did draft something. I almost called it "An Appreciation" as it's in appreciation of the man who sells Real Change outside the post office on Greenwood Avenue. But then I figured my appreciation was clear. In Front of the Post Office "Hello, queen," sings the man who sells newspapers. You wouldn't think I'd be so charmed, but who else greets me this way? When I leave with my paper, I never hear another customer receive the greeting I almost believe he keeps for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the October "Short Forms" class I taught. This was the first of my independent online writing classes that I taught where the assignments were designed to work for writing poetry or prose, rather than just poetry. I think that opening up the assignments in this way was a good fit for me as an instructor and for offering greater flexibility for students in terms of being able to use the class as a springboard to write what they wanted to write. At first I was thinking I could do another class running from mid-November to mid-December, but now I'm thinking that January would be a better time. I have an idea for the next class where it would also allow for both poetry and prose writing--and it would have a visual art component. The class would focus on exploring images. It would mostly be writing, but then we'd also do a piece where we worked with words in a visual way (like making cut-ups ). And I'm mulling around a collage assignment, too. I...

I can't remember how many years ago it was when I first bought web hosting. It was at least ten years ago, but probably closer to fifteen. Well, this makes me feel old. Anyway...! The first web hosting service I paid for was from a tiny company run by a friend of a friend. When my account expired, I switched to GoDaddy; if I remember correctly, this was because the rates went up at the tiny company, and I got a coupon for a good deal from GoDaddy. Lately I've been researching other web hosts to see if I might switch to a smaller company, in part because I want to support indie businesses, and in part because I'm thinking about starting some different websites focused on specific topics (maybe even a specific site focused on online creative writing classes!). In looking for smaller hosting companies, I found a blog with web hosting reviews , run by a stay-at-home-dad named Jerry. These are Jerry's current top 5 picks for web hosts. I hadn't heard of any of these my...

Thanks to those of you who have signed up for the October online writing class and/or helped to get the word out. Six writers have already enrolled. I'm looking forward to working with both prose and poetry this time around. Meanwhile, did you know that over the summer, I started selling t-shirts, toys, and other odds and ends on eBay? I love buying t-shirts, and in a way this has been an excuse for me to buy a bunch of t-shirts without running out of space in my dresser drawers. Here are a couple of cool shirts we've found recently. The shirt above is vintage from David Bowie's 1990 Sound + Vision tour. The shirt below is a mash-up of Dr. Who and My Little Pony. What did you do over the summer?

I wrote a series of poems a few years back when the Chehalis River in Washington state flooded and blocked Interstate 5 for days. In reading and watching news stories about the flooding in Colorado, I've thought a lot about the people there and the damage to the landscape and roadways. We drove to Boulder last year when I went to Colorado with Trish to visit her family, and it's amazing to see how Boulder Creek has become such a raging body of water. Tonight as I was thinking of this current flooding, I remembered the poems I wrote about the Chehalis. Here's one that borrows found text from a map of road closures. Closures and Restrictions Trees down. Sinkhole. Broken levee. Debris in road. Rising water. Mudslide. Several lanes washed out. Watch for mud and overflow from ditches. One lane. Local traffic only. Deep water marked with cones. Rough but passable. Bridge intact. Highway clear. Heavy traffic. Open to all cars. Open to trucks with perishable loads.

I've just set up the signup page for the first "Short Forms" writing class , to run October 1-31. Like the other independently run online writing classes I've offered, this class costs just $50. Students will complete four writing assignments over the course of the month and receive constructive, encouraging feedback from me on all four pieces. These classes have offered a lot of camaraderie and support among the writers taking the class, and I have found it a true pleasure to read the pieces as well as the comments people have shared. The assignments for the Short Forms class will allow for responses in the genre(s) of the students' choice. You can write nonfiction. You can write fiction. You can write poetry. You can write any or all of the above at any given moment! Please feel free to leave a comment below and/or email me if you have any questions. And please click here for more info and to sign up via PayPal (I can also accept payment via check--just let...

I've been mulling it over for months, the idea of offering an online writing class that expands beyond focusing on poetry writing. This morning I sat down and made some notes toward planning a new class, this one suitable for both prose and poetry writing. The idea is that the class would focus on "short forms," and the assignments could work for prose or poetry: students could choose for each assignment what form they wanted to use. So you could do all fiction writing, or all nonfiction writing, or all poetry writing, or a combo. I'm thinking of having this run as a month-long class in October. More info to come very soon, and if you're interested in the idea of this class and have any thoughts/suggestions/etc about what you'd like to see in such a class, please do let me know!

Out of nowhere (or so it seemed), I had two people I didn't know order copies of my zine, From Dinosaur to Denver , from my Etsy shop last week. Dinosaur is a tiny 8-page zine about camping with Trish at Dinosaur National Monument on our road trip in the summer of 2012 from Seattle to Denver, where her parents live. One of the people who ordered the zine ordered five copies, which was extra-cool. This inspired me to set to work on a second Teeny Tiny Travels zine. This zine is called Seattle to Spokane to Steamboat and is about a quick trip we took in June of this year to Eastern Washington. I've finished writing and formatting the text, and now I need to print it out and do the layout for the zine. I like doing cut-and-paste layout by hand for my tiny zines. I cut out some interesting images from my piles of collage materials last night, so hopefully they'll work for the zine.

With summer quarter starting, I've been super-busy because not only am I teaching a new theme for my Research Writing class, but I'm also teaching on Canvas instead of Blackboard. While I've been using Canvas for my indie poetry classes, this is my first time using Canvas for my college teaching, and I have a lot more material to upload, plus I need to do grading while the indie classes are ungraded. Sometimes I get frustrated because I'm so used to the Blackboard interface, but I do understand why people like Canvas because it does look more like a web page, and it's easier to embed links to different files, assignments, etc. Normally I upload my new assignments for the poetry class on Fridays, but I need to upload the fourth and final assignment for the June 21-July 21 class on Saturday this week. The final assignment involves writing a poem which uses found text, which of course is a writing exercise that's close to my heart! If you're kind enough to be...