How much can be said in how small a space? This is the question I was attempting to answer when I began soliciting texts of 50 words or less from authors I admired (read 'loved') several years ago. These tiny-framed works, dubbed as 'Stamp Stories' because of their being printed on cardstock approximately the size of a postage stamp, helped me to better know what the core of a story looked like, what it meant to make everything smaller, and I became addicted to seeking out the best renditions of these. One-hundred authors later, Mud Luscious Press Stamp Stories have been distributed by forty indie presses, and now, as we stand ready to birth the perfect-bound edition [ C. ] An MLP Stamp Stories Anthology which collects all of these Stamp Stories into a single book, Scott Garson and the inimitable Wigleaf give us the opportunity to once more discover what can exist in so tight a womb.

What resides in the thirteen original Stamp Stories published in this special edition of Wigleaf are the ways in which profound words can have profound meaning on a page the size of a thumb. What Kathy Fish and Terese Svoboda and Michael Bible have in common is that they all see both the largess of life and the smallness of our hands. What Joanna Ruocco and Rachel B. Glaser and Adam Peterson have in common is that they bring to bear words as words are meant: constantly growing outside of themselves. There are very few authors who can do this tiny-writing well, who can take what cures our ails in the sentences of sentences and make them even tighter, more refined, denser at their absolute most implosive points. [ C. ] An MLP Stamp Stories Anthology contains one-hundred of them, and this edition of Wigleaf resounds with thirteen new ones.

Inside of these is a light that hasn't reached us yet, but will, in time, as the world expands around them.



J.A. Tyler

J.A. Tyler is the Founding Editor of Mud Luscious Press.

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