Honing Your Craft: Developing Artistic Skills on a Budget Zine Microcosm Publishing

Honing Your Craft: Developing Artistic Skills on a Budget

Do you dream of being a writer but despair of finding the resources to make it happen? Writing for your passion or even for a living doesn’t have to involve expensive classes, retreats, workshops, pitch sessions, freelance editors, or any of the bells and whistles people are happy to try to sell you. Hell you don’t even need to own a computer!

Lydia Rogue shares pointers, ideas, and trade secrets for the brokest among us for all the most essential tasks that writers do – from the mechanics of getting words out of your brain to building a network, and finding readers. Because art should be accessible to everyone!

Designed + Produced in Portland, Oregon
* Woman Owned Business

Portland’s most colorful, authentic, and empowering publishing house and distributor, Microcosm Publishing equips readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice.Microcosm has lived in milk crates, in closets, in a mud room, in a windowless basement, in a church, and under a desk at a major credit card company. We’ve brought our brightly colored books to infoshops, zine fests, media summits, bicycle conferences, parks, street corners, house shows, dirty bars, all­night coffeeshops, art museums, and every corner of the mainstream where we can clear away a little space to set up shop. We set out to save ourselves from not caring, but out there in the margins we’ve found communities worth always doing it better for. Now we have contracts instead of handshakes, a warehouse instead of a fanny pack full of zines. We have a staff, we have relationships in the industry that send our books to places we wouldn’t have dreamed we could walk into ourselves. We’re not as drunk or dirty as we used to be. But still, at heart, we’ve got this milk crate strapped to the back of a bike and we’re riding wildly across town to hand you the book that might just be the one that saves your life!