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...

Since November of 2012, I've been working on a little project called With Five Questions, a blog where I post five-question interviews with writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and more. I occasionally do other sorts of posts, too, but the majority of the posts are interviews. I conduct the interviews over email, and it's always fun to see the responses people come up with to the questions I've written for them. The other day, I posted one of my very favorite interviews, with Laura-Marie Taylor , a poet in Sacramento who has been making zines for many years. I hope you'll check it out. If you're at all interested in zines, I think you'll appreciate Laura-Marie's; they are thoughtfully written and carefully made. If you're a poet looking for places to publish your work, I happened upon a listing the other day for The Poetry Market Ezine , which is a free email newsletter with lists of magazine publishers who are accepting submissions of poetry. I remember re...

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...

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'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...