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 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...

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.

Yesterday, I did the cutting-and-pasting process of laying out issue 14 of Teeny Tiny . I'd had the written content ready for a while, but I hadn't managed to finish the zine! Well, it takes a little concentration, as I like to find a nice combo of images to go along with the writing I'm publishing, and this issue contains work from seven different writers. I used a selection of bits and pieces from two vintage issues of Hit Parader magazine from the 1950s. Have you ever seen old issues of this magazine? Basically they printed the lyrics to popular songs and then also included some profiles of pop stars and maybe some articles with tips on beauty and so on. The magazines have some fun little advertisements, especially toward the back, with illustrations that are just the right size for my zine. I also used a couple of pictures cut from a book on the solar system I bought at the thrift store some time ago to use for the greeting cards I make with images of the moon ...

I published an eight-page, single-sheet zine called Small Is Beautiful and shared copies with the participants in the workshop I taught at Write on the Sound earlier this month. The zine is subtitled "ideas for writing and publishing," and it contains ideas for four writing exercises as well as a few leads for publishing short poems and prose pieces. Basically, it's meant as a little bit of inspiration for those times when writing seems big and daunting, and it would help to remember that even the longest poems and novels came together one line at a time. If you'd like a copy of the zine, I'll send one your way for just one dollar via PayPal (shipping cost included in the $1). Oh, and here's one more picture of the zines in a vintage Kraft cheese box just because I only scored this box earlier this week, and I like it! Did you know processed American cheese used to come in wooden boxes?

I've told this story before when I've given readings, but I realized that I've never posted to this blog about why I gave the name Teeny Tiny to my zine and small press. When I was little, one of my favorite stories was the story of the teeny tiny woman. The story was in a collection of children's stories; I think it was part of a set of something like four volumes, but I can't remember for sure. (The books my brother and I had when we were kids must be stored in a box in his attic; I know we couldn't have gotten rid of them.) I remember my mom reading me the story, and also I remember paging through the collection of stories and looking at the other stories in sort of a passing way but then returning to the story of the teeny tiny woman and her teeny tiny cat. For a long time, I thought the title of the story was The Teeny Tiny Woman, but it was actually published as Teeny-Tiny Tale by Jan Sukus. Not long ago, my friend Sandy found a copy of the book that ...

I've been wanting to combine the texts of my two chapbooks of poems inspired by craigslist ads ( I Meant to Say and Take It ) into a longer book for quite some time now. I was going to do it in a more zine/book arts way, but then I thought, hey, why not experiment with Lulu.com? It was a pretty smooth process for a non-designer such as myself. I mean, I like to make collages, but I'm no expert in design software, etc. Once you choose the size of book you want, you can download a Word template and paste in your text. Then they have book cover templates, and the process of working with the template was like an extended version of the template-maneuvering I do when I have postcards printed with Vistaprint. Lulu gives you text and cover proofs to download, and I felt comfortable with the layout process. In fact, when I had a little problem converting my Word document to a PDF file with the page size I needed, the Lulu interface converted my file for me. Anyway, after some h...

Stacey Printz, a choreographer who has created work inspired by honeybees, directed me to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle which discusses her bee-related piece as well as some other pieces inspired by scientific topics (like string theory). I sent Stacey an email last week, and she sent a friendly reply and said she'd be glad to answer some questions. I think the best idea might be to think of writing some bee essays in the size/format of my Teeny Tiny zine as this seems like the most low-key and fun way for me to go about a project.