Water Marks, Plankton Press’s First Chapbook!

Plankton Press began what I hope will be a long and tiny tenure in chapbook publishing with the release of Water Marks, word and images reflecting on wet (December 2018). The plan is begin to publish the art/words of other people, but I have been guinea-pigging the publishing process with my own creations, starting with zines and now adding this chapbook.

Water Marks includes sixteen ink/watercolor drawings I made while listening to water music (playlist in the back of the chapbook), and words I’ve written and collected about water over the years. None of it is previously published elsewhere.

Sample spread:

specs: 5×5 inch square, perfect bind, 59 pages. Hybrid of ink, watercolor, poetry and prose.

Price: 10 USD. Copies are at Wasted Ink Zine Distro and/or you can e-mail me about purchasing a copy (fishewan at gmail.com).

Like making zines, creating a chapbook from start to finish is a wonderful experience. I used InDesign to lay it out, scanned the images at home (also where I write and draw), but learned the process of chapbook-making through an online class in the Literary Kitchen. It was super helpful for learning the publishing steps, places to print, things to think about before committing to a layout or page count. Plus the Literary Kitchen is an awesome community of writers/poets/artists. Check out all the books these amazing women have published!  Water Marks is about the size and weight of a music CD (remember those?), but is a printed book (remember those?). Yay, print lives!