I'd almost forgotten that one of the great joys of running a chapbook press is the ability to publish on a whim. Specifically, the joys of self-publishing on whim. When I first started self-publishing chapbooks I'd be struck by an idea one night and by the next morning I'd have produced fifty-copies of something. Literally. I'd be up until 3 or 4 am, printing, folding, stapling... and I'd have something to give out to friends.

While I know that the quality of my work has come as a long way since those early days, sometimes I overthink projects to the point of procrastinating them out of existence. With others' work this happens less often, but with my own it's very easy to projects slide.

I'm hoping that 2018 will be different. I've started the year off pretty well with the publication of EARTHQUACKS & Other One-Word Poems. I'd had the idea of doing a small collection of one-word poems for a few years now. This past weekend I had a free night, so I finally decided I'd start working on it. I put in some long nights, played some records and stayed up stamping until 3 am, and within 3 days the project was finished.

I'm really happy with this little publication. I had some nice surprises while putting it together. I had no idea what the title was going to be until I started stamping. Poems got swapped out at the last minute, which really changed the tone of the project. I'd imagined each poem would be printed in lower case in black ink, but I ended up printing in upper case in blue ink.

That's another one of the joys of publishing like this. Sometimes the publication gets to decide how it'll look. I just have to agree and stamp away.

Stay tuned, friends. Lots more to come in 2018!