Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

Earlier this week I went to the launch party for T(our) Magazine . The editors of T(our) do a nice job of building gay/straight alliances at the same time as they seek out poems and prose from writers from Seattle and beyond. The magazine is available in print and online: the individual pieces from the debut issue are available here . There are four poems of mine , from a larger series I've been working on for a few years, poems which borrow found text from biographies and old gossip magazine articles about Dusty Springfield as well as 1930s-1950s Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Lizabeth Scott. Also, two of my poems about bees and beekeeping just went online in Camroc Press Review . The first poem has its start in found text from sections from beekeeping manuals about the anatomy of bees, and the second is about the way honeybees are shipped north from California to beekeepers in Washington state. I continue to read Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems ...

As I was browsing the shelves at the Couth Buzzard bookshop before participating in a reading/performance there last Saturday, I found the book Generation A by Douglas Coupland. I've read several of his novels, but I didn't realize he'd written a novel that has to do with the demise of bees. I'll probably start reading it when I finish the novel I'm currently reading, Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate. Other books I've been reading lately are collections of poems by Tim Dlugos and Marie Ponsot.

I thought I was stalled out at nineteen poems about honeybees, and then I finished a twentieth one. I've been working on these poems since sometime around March 2011 when I first knew that Trish was going to start beekeeping. So it isn't a speedy project, but it's one that means a lot to me. The poem I wrote today is about the commercially kept bees who are trucked around the country to pollinate various crops. If you haven't heard about this practice, check out this article from 2009 from Discover : Who Killed All Those Bees? We Did .

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.

I've been meaning to add a page to my website with links to published nonfiction clips, and I finally did this last night. It's a pretty simple page , but hey, I'm pretty simplistic in my web-design skills. This morning, I sent a query to a publication I haven't written for before, and we'll see how that goes. But if you never send a query, nothing new ever happens. I haven't sent a query in ages. The gig with EDGE fell into my lap via a craigslist ad; I didn't have to query--I only had to answer the ad. I'm looking at different ideas for writing about bees and conceptualizing these ideas as article-sized pieces, so I'm also trying to think of possible markets for these articles. A weird thing about nonfiction contrasted with poetry is that with nonfiction you can actually conceive of a market for your work whereas with poetry it's more that you write the poem and see if maybe later it seems like it might be a fit for a certain magazine where may...

Since I started this blog, I've only posted poems, but lately I've been writing a little nonfiction again, and I thought I'd expand the scope of the content that I post here. I used to write and publish nonfiction articles and reviews pretty regularly, and I've been getting into that again as I've written four reviews for an online publication called EDGE, most recently this review of Don Quixote at Pacific Northwest Ballet. I also have an idea for a larger nonfiction project about honeybees, which would combine personal experience with research and interviews, and maybe a road trip or two for good measure (gotta get out and visit some of the honeybees of the western states). In talking about the project with my friend Mimi, she suggested I consider looking at the ways that bees have inspired art projects, and this morning I happened upon a project someone wrote about a few years ago called the Honeybee Ballet . Well, I think there could be an article or two to wr...