Tag Archives: Literary journal

The Pencil Eaters, Volume 2

Somehow or other, I did it again: a literary journal written and illustrated by children. I used tax credit donations to pay for professional printing, which saved me about 5 hours and really provided a superior product. Although these books cost a little more than $7 each to produce. This year we have fiction, poetry, 3 interviews (1 real, 2 not), 4 songs (3 original, 1 a parody of “Eye of the Tiger” called “Nose of the Panther”), a very silly book review, and a lot of drawings is lions, plus a few other things.

Tuesday we had a release party and literary reading. The kids catered it so there were a LOT of cookies. We had about 40 people I’d say, which is not a bad turnout for a literary reading.

If you would like to support the arts and writing programs, you can visit this site: https://www.tusd1.org/donate

Select “Lineweaver Elementary” from the school menu and “Writing Program” from the item menu. If you are an Arizona resident, you can apply this money to your state taxes and even if you’re not a resident it’s still tax deductible.

The Pencil Eaters Volume 1!

As mentioned before in this blog, the way I live is that I think of insane things and then I do them. And 2 years ago I had the insane idea of producing a literary journal written entirely by 8–10 year olds. Couldn’t get it rolling last year, but AMAZINGLY it came together this year.

it’s 80 pages long, it’s got poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama, and it’s also illustrated by the kids. It took them over 6 months to create and it took me about 30 hours to slap it into its final form. (I typed their work in Google Docs and laid it out in Photoshop. I made a lot of mistakes (typos and such and apparently lost 2 poems 😔) but I did my best and I think the kids appreciated it.

Obviously, they chose the title.

We celebrated with a release party and literary reading this afternoon. Now I’m thinking about how I can improve it next year. I’m hopefully we can get volume 2 professionally printed because stapling 100 of these things was not fun. But it’s always nice to finish a big project.