Notes from The Chapbook Factory

I've been thinking about...

Mar 18, 2025

Hi everyone,

How are you?

I’m writing a couple of days after The Chapbook Factory's final meeting together.

It has been a really special six weeks of reading and writing and talking and editing and formatting and printing and making things happen.

I never know who’s going to sign up when I plan these things, but somehow the perfect group always seems to come together. Everyone was so wonderful and supportive of one another. And a lot of people in the group actually wrote and produced a chapbook within the six weeks!!!

And a few others are almost ready too! :)

I’ll tell you more about the books people wrote once they feel ready to share them.

But for now I want to talk a little about the chapbook I ended up making myself.

I had to make a chapbook because everybody else was doing it!

Chapbook Fever is contagious!

This chapbook is made up of texts we wrote together as part of our meetings. I asked the group to respond to prompts individually and then we mixed everybody’s writing together to make some big, collaborative, anonymous essays or poems (or something) that attempt to crystallise the moment.

In the first meeting, I asked everybody to write down what they’d been thinking about lately, and after we quickly compiled the text, I asked if anybody wanted to volunteer to read it out loud.

Four people in four different countries read the text aloud together, each taking one sentence at a time, and it felt like a really beautiful moment!

It’s sort of hard to believe it was only six weeks ago, and how much can be achieved in such a short time, when you work together with a group.

If you want to read the chapbook, please do! I uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

I edited and designed it on the computer, printed it out on paper, assembled it, stapled it, scanned it back into the computer, and uploaded it to the internet so you can read it.

I can’t explain why.