When I was a child I started to write the Japanese form of poetry called haiku. My teacher had our entire class do this one day and I found that for me it was a great way to write poetry. I liked the syllable counting aspect that I had to fit my words to. My Mom thought that my sister and I should make a book of our poems and give them to our extended family as a holiday gift. This was my first foray into how to publish my own writing.
My Dad’s work place had a copy machine we could use, so we went there and created our own booklets and sent them to our relatives. After that point I was always interested in making books out of my writing. When I was eighteen I met others who were zine writers, and who were publishing chap books, poetry and their own literary magazines. We all did these works by going to Kinko’s to make the copies and then using staples and glue.
I started going to poetry slams almost every week. The other poets I met in this environment were all extremely interested in doing anything themselves, and this included putting out books or booklets of their writing.
My boyfriend of that decade was a musician but in his free time he would spend hours making a bunch of small, funny books that he said were kid’s books, thus teaching himself how to publish. He had a whole randomizing process for making creations out of a collection of clip art. Then he’d randomly pick words from a dictionary and randomly select which sets went together.
His book, ‘A is for Walrus’ masqueraded as a harmless alphabet book for toddlers. If you read it, you would find that it was not really a children’s book but a dark and interesting art project which most parents would never want to read to their children.
His hobby moved me to continue my own learning process about book marketing. I really liked taking my pieces of poetry and combining them together into an organic, home made book.
Ten years later a friend and I decided to create hand made journals to use as our personalized holiday gifts that year. We had a hole driller and using discarded paper, and string to tie the books together, we created a journal for each person on our gift list. We decorated them with spray paint stencils and origami paper and they turned out great.
