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...

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'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!

Thanks to everyone who helped me get the word out about my summer poetry class. I have 11 students, and class started yesterday. The first assignment involves writing an ode/praise song. I'm looking forward to reading the poems that the students submit! Meanwhile, the weather here in Seattle has turned chilly, which isn't unusual for June. So in order to feel a little warmed up, I'm posting a photo I took earlier this month when we visited Dry Falls in Eastern Washington.

To borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say" that I have four open spots remaining for the month-long poetry writing class which begins this Friday, June 21, the first day of summer. The class runs through July 21. It's a 100% online class, facilitated through the Canvas learning management system. It's also a totally independent class, operated by me and not through a school or any other program. For more info, please check out this link , and feel free to comment here or email me if you have any questions!

I've just uploaded the information about the next online poetry class I'm offering. It starts on June 21 and runs through July 21. I've compiled a new set of four assignments, so if you're currently taking my April class, you'd be doing all different assignments if you were to enroll in the summer class. I chose assignments for the class that have potential for reflecting a summery theme, but of course I welcome content on all sorts of topics. I just thought some writers might enjoy the idea of writing about summertime. As ever, I hope you'll help me in spreading the word about the class, and please do let me know if you have any questions. Many, many thanks!

One of my online writer friends, Rebeka, wrote an interesting post today about a famous two-line poem by Ezra Pound . In a way, poems like Pound's are sort of the English language version of haiku: concise and image-focused. You get a clear sense of action/emotion from just a handful of words. Writing very, very short poems like this can be a great writing exercise. Can you condense an observation or experience down into just two or three lines? Or what about stringing a series of very tiny poems together to form a short sequence? I'm also reminded of Laura-Marie , a poet who sometimes shapes poems by writing just one line a day until the lines add up into a poem that feels finished. I know I've written about similar (if not the very same!) writing exercises before, but that's because I think they work. :)

The students in my English 100 classes recently submitted their essays about reading and interpreting poetry. They had three poems to choose from--in the essay they just needed to write about one poem and how their interpretation of that poem developed over time. (I thank Nancy Kennedy for the framework of this assignment; she gave it to me many years ago now.) I try to change up the selection of poems for this assignment, and this quarter I assigned "The Cabbage" by Ruth Stone for the first time. The full text of the poem is available here on poets.org . I think the students enjoyed this poem. Rereading it again I find it's a good example of a poem that makes interesting use of "you" rather than "I" for its voice; I think this can be hard to pull off. This poem would be a good basis for a writing exercise in which you write a piece in the second-person voice. Ruth Stone also has a great poem about having a burger at McDonald's, but it doesn'...

A few bloggers have posted about my online poetry class recently, and I wanted to say thank you. Beach Sloth wrote about my class on Blogger and also put the posting on tumblr , which is cool because my friends Katie and Suzanne and Chad reblogged it. I really enjoy Beach Sloth's writing, and I hope you have a chance to check out one of the posts from this creative writer who spends a lot of time reading and writing about contemporary poetry and prose by indie authors. Eileen Tabios mentions the class in part of a post about the tiny chapbook I published of her tiny book , Novel Chatelaine . By the way, Eileen is looking for tiny books as part of her new project, Sit With Moi, so be sure to check it out and maybe even make a small book to send her! She always does a great job of sharing her projects through photos, blog posts, and more. Thanks also to Reading Renee for her post about the class, and to Bethany Reid for mentioning my blog as part of a "poetry blog hop...

My April poetry class is one-fourth of the way full, which is very exciting. I think this idea to run an indie online class came just in time because my computer crashed last night--if the class fills, it should cover about half the price of a new computer. The computer crashed just after I finished writing the budget proposal for Between the Lines for the 2013-14 school year; unfortunately I wasn't able to email the proposal in time, so I'll have a little rewriting to do later today. Oh, and I have 50 essay drafts to comment on, too. I'm borrowing a computer at this moment, but of course the other big item on my to-do list for today is to buy a computer! Meanwhile, if there's a poet in your life who might like a unique Valentine's Day gift, why not sign him or her up for an online class ? As Oscar Wilde said, "Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." (I struggle with self-promotion, so I thought I'd turn to Oscar Wilde for inspira...

I've decided to offer a 100% online poetry class for National Poetry Month this year. I've been wanting to put together a free-standing online class for quite a while now, and I'm finally giving it a try! As most of you know, I teach online every quarter at Edmonds Community College, so I have a lot of experience in the distance learning format. The difference, of course, is that this class is completely independent of any college or other educational program. Below is a description of the class and information on how to register. * Celebrate National Poetry Month by treating yourself to an affordable online poetry writing class with a helpful, down-to-earth instructor. Learn to write poems from the comfort of your home through a supportive, accessible online workshop. No previous experience with poetry writing or online classes required. The course instructor, Amanda Laughtland, is a published poet with an MFA in English from the University of Washington. A trained ...