As you can see by the photo, Kingfisher #14 has arrived! Actually, this photo is a few days old, because not only has the journal arrived, but it’s packaged up and ready to be mailed to all the lovely people who ordered copies. Thank you!
I wasn’t expecting the boxes to arrive until today, but the printer was particularly speedy this time. As some of you know, I’ve been using Woodinville PRINT since the beginning. Back in 2020 when I started the journal, I was living in Woodinville, Washington, and they were as local a printer as I could find (about 15 minutes from my house). When I moved to Oregon a few years later, I decided to stick with them because they know which papers to use, they’re easy to work with, and they’ve always done a good job. They make sure the pdfs I send them look good, then they send the files to Puget Bindery to produce the physical journals. From there, they ship them to my house in Happy Valley. It’s always a thrill when those two heavy boxes arrive on my doorstep!
The next step is to unpack and count them, which includes flipping through random copies to make sure everything looks good. There have been a few minor hiccups over the years, but if you haven’t noticed them, I’m not going to tell you what they are! š Once I’m satisfied, I pay the invoice and set up my mailing station, which is one of those folding card tables, you know, the kind used more often for extra seating at holiday dinners than for actual card games.
For the first few issues, I spent hours at the post office counter while the helpful postal workers at the Woodinville Post Office processed each and every envelope. It was beyond tedious, for them even more than for me. Then I learned about pirateship.com, which costs more than mailing issues at the post office counter, but means that I can print the postage labels at home and then drop off the whole bunch of domestic orders at the counter. They scan a single bar code for all the packages, and voila! International packages I still take to the postal counter to mail, but using pirateship.com is a huge time-saver, at least as far as the post office is concerned. Plus, it provides tracking information, which is useful for locating wayward packages.
So that’s the story of how Kingfisher goes from a pdf to a physical journal. Is it a lot of work? Yeah, but by doing it myself, I know it’s being done right. I like supporting a local print shop and my local post office. And it’s extremely satisfying to drop off those envelopes at said post office, knowing that they’ll be winging their ways to eager readers all over the world.
If you haven’t yet ordered a copy of #14 or a subscription for #14 & 15, you can do so here: https://kingfisherjournal.com/shop/ I ordered some extra copies this time around because the holidays are coming and Kingfisher makes a great gift for poets and non-poets alike. Enjoy the issue!
