HOOT

It’s the last day of and another day of putting out new postcard back issues of HOOT. Swing by table 146, we have prose and poetry (and art) on postcards to share with your buddies. We also have a bag of chips if you’re hungry. 💌

We’re back at Table 146 with our many postcards, come hang out!

Hey hi! We’re here over in the hinterlands of at table 146. Come say hi and grab some postcards filled with prose and poetry, keep me and my cheddar jalapeño Cheetos company.

We’re hanging out with our friends at during AWP to host a reading & hang out on Friday, March 6th from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM with a whole gaggle of Scrawl Place and HOOT Review authors.

Located at .studios, there will be stocked bar and plenty of friends.

It wouldn’t be right to share this post in a silo without acknowledging that everything feels infuriating, chaotic, and frightening. Both HOOT and Scrawl Place are here to share community with you, share art, and provide a space to share literature, share resources, and build support networks.

We’re helping and hanging out with our friends at on March 6th for a very rad reading from some lovely contributors. If you have some time, it would be delightful to see your face and share some space while listening to truly magical prose and poetry.

Donating any proceeds we have to MIRACMN, any back issues of postcards for letter writing campaigns, and will be your buddy if you’d like to attend a community meeting. Working in immigration law the last two years, and social work before that, while running these very small lit mags is connective tissue. Anything I’ve got is yours.

It was so difficult to pick our Best of the Net nominations this year. Here all our nominations, highly recommend giving them all a read. Each piece moved us closer to the moon 💚

Tomorrow we’re hosting a writing workshop at in collaboration with from 1:00 - 3:00 PM. This is a generative workshop focusing on creating poems inspired by vintage postcards and writing poems intended for design on a postcard. All skill levels encouraged!

In the first half of the workshop, writers will respond to their choice of old postcards to draft poems inspired by the art, location, and age of the postcard. These poems can speak directly to the images, or what the sender might have written on the back. In the second half, writers will brainstorm and write a poem meant for display on a postcard as a shareable work of art. We’ll explore the poems’ images, senses, and emotions to see what unexpected visuals emerge to incorporate into a design.

In the end, we’ll discuss how ephemera is used to distribute poetry and as a promotional tool for people to sample your work. Writers can share their poems (only if you like!) and will have the opportunity to submit them for a special edition postcard included in the summer issue of Collide.

The workshop is a $10 donation and comes with a year of HOOT’s postcards, handouts on how to print your own postcard, and a list of places to submit that focus on single print issues. But please don’t let finances deter you, if you’d like to attend, just show up and HOOT will cover the cost.

Tl;dr: come write short poems about postcards AND write poems to be made into postcards.

It’s National Poetry Month. Many years ago, while I was an intern at a fledgling HOOT Review (no pun intended) and just before I gave my cat, Easy Mac, a bath, the HOOT crewed marked off poetry month with a line from The Waste Land by Eliot on Easy’s side in eyeliner, April is the cruellest month being a subversion of the opening lines from Chaucer’s General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.
(Easy Mac was safe with the eyeliner which was promptly washed away along with her grime during her needed cleaning).

HOOT Review, our postcard press, started October 2011 (13 years ago, going on 14) and a lot has changed since then: both for the editors personally and, like, basically everything else in the world. Keeping any indie / small lit (or art) project alive is challenging and HOOT hasn’t been without those challenges: spending pennies from low paying jobs to purchase the postcards / postage, setbacks and grief, COVID, family needs, demanding jobs, and never enough time to accomplish everything. Some months the best we can do is triage (it’s only 3 editors keeping this babe around). In fact, this post is comin’ at you live after the 2nd failed attempt in as many weeks to buy postcard stamps and the post office not having any.

But even with challenges and setbacks, keeping HOOT around is a joy and an honor. Lo-fi and tactile: sending poetry and prose to others is our form of connection, which is why we hand write every note. Plus, we love USPS. While a lot has happened in 13+ years, HOOT is still here and we’ll continue our postcard press for as long as possible. Easy Mac is still here, too. Adopted when she was 4 years old, she is now about to turn 17; Easy has been a constant for HOOT. As such, we decided to share a new Easy photo with a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay: celebrating spring but not in the old way.

Along with Easy, here is the villainous editor, Summerslam 1992, trying to eat our postcards, and some small sweet poems on postcards from HOOT authors (art by author) and Robert Estes (art by ).

This is an insanely long way of saying: Happy National Poetry Month. We hope your poems are poem’ing

Last day, cutie pies, come swing by and see our tiny table for the AWP book fair and grab some poems and prose on postcards 💌

New day, new postcards out at our table (T239). Swing by and say hi and grab some bite-sized lit. 🦉