6.13.2025
MONDAY EDITIONS: THE STORY OF A MICROPRESS
Monday Editions was founded in Seattle in 1994. The press took its name from the Mondays I had set aside for writing and making art—sacrosanct time reclaimed from editing, translating, and ghosting other people’s manuscripts and books while producing corporate copy on the side.
For the next twenty years, Monday Editions issued a potpourri of comics, zines, and mail art dispatched from Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland to paying subscribers in the United States, Canada, the UK, and France. An annual $21 subscription entitled the buyer to six mailings of anything I felt like sending: a color-photocopied six-panel Little Bunny comic, a handmade microchapbook of short-shorts or prose poems, an invitation to participatory mail fraud, whatever.
The press’s output, always sporadic, declined over a stretch of years when other demands took precedence.
But that changed in June 2023, when Monday Editions published A Party of Another Kind, my minichapbook of poems sent as a premium to paying Diary Poems subscribers six months after I started this Substack. In 2024, the press published that book’s revised edition along with my minichapbook Black Shirt Emblazoned, another premium for paying subscribers.
Now it’s 2025, and things have changed again. The press has come to new life as a micropublisher of poetry chapbooks in limited editions signed, and numbered by their authors.
It gives me great pleasure to announce that the first chapbook to be published by Monday Editions under the new model is The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams, by James Maynard, a Portland-based poet and veteran Substacker.
Read our executive editor’s description of the book here. And if you’re in Portland, you can see James read at Word Virus Books, 6518 SE Foster Road, from 7 to 8 PM on Monday, June 16, which is not only the book’s official publication date but also Bloomsday—and James Maynard’s birthday, to boot.
One more thing.
Every cent from paid subscriptions to Diary Poems goes to the publication of Monday Editions poetry chapbooks. If you’ve ever purchased a monthly or annual subscription or bought me a coffee, your generosity supported the publication of this book.
Heartfelt thanks to Christopher Alexander, Risa Denenberg, Tracy Hadley, Pamm Hanson, Mary Holscher, Alexis Kane, David Lyman, Kiki MacInnis, Victoria Nordgren, Celeste Pfister, Mary Pierce, Laura Pilnick, Jonathan Potter, Mike Rivera, Mary Roblyn, Sue Rose, Denise Wagner, Cathy Wickham, and Paul Wittenberger. You’re the best. Thanks also to the Social Security Administration, not formally acknowledged on the book’s copyright page.
Congratulations X.P.! This is amazing and magnificent! I couldn’t be more delighted to have had any small part in your ability to bring this forth!
Thanks for clueing us in to this interesting history. I consider A Party of Another Kind to be a mini-masterpiece!