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...

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. ...

Here's a poem I wrote for Trish some time ago, and I think it's a good fit for Valentine's Day. This was published in Sinister Wisdom last year, and the editors kindly nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. Learning You said the Greeks said "know thyself" and "all things in moderation" and I agree it may be best to know me moderately, a woman who loves cookies, movies, Converse hi- and low-tops, books, cats, cardigan sweaters and--immoderately--you. Know me deeply and there's the mire of things I'm still learning. You know how I thought I didn't want kids? I've learned it was only that I'd never known any nor any adult who could surprise me into imagining myself with a family. I hope everyone enjoys the day. We're planning to go to the Experience Music Project to finally see the Nirvana exhibit!

So I've been writing some little articles to post on EzineArticles.com, a website which hosts all sorts of content on all sorts of topics. The site gets good traffic, so it's a way to share my work and hopefully encourage people to check out other projects of mine online (like this blog or my Etsy shop , etc). I've written four articles so far. With the first three, I haven't received any feedback beyond a Facebook "like" or two. Now with the fourth article, I've received two emails in one night from people I've never met, and both of the people are telling me how helpful the article is. Go figure. It's an article about five strategies for proofreading your own work , based on ideas I've suggested to students (and probably most--if not all--of these ideas were suggested to me at one time or another by other writing teachers). I do think the strategies are useful, so maybe I've provided a public service to the writers of the world by pulli...

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?

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 ...

Three of my poems utilizing bits of text from books on backcountry hiking/camping just went online in NAP , a lit mag edited by Chad Redden. Thanks, Chad! I need to return to working on this series, I think, especially with hiking/camping season upon us.