Stirring Words

plus welcoming our new team members, wishing for a better world, and a little writing wisdom from Sadie Maskery

Author

Little Thoughts Press
July 31, 2025

Issue 11: Stirring Words is now available to preorder! A celebration of words that will inspire, delight, and entrance young readers, Stirring Words captures the magic of language in all its quirky, stupendous, and surprising forms!

cover of Little Thoughts Press ssue 1: Stirring Words

When Little Thoughts Press started in November of 2021, it was a tiny two-gal operation with a small core of dedicated readers, and I cannot believe how much it has grown since then! Thank you to all of our amazing readers and subscribers and to all of the writers and artists who have shared their work with us over the years. We started out as a little engine that could and now we are a high-speed rail that needs a much bigger crew to keep us on track. I am so excited to welcome so many wonderful new people to our Little Thoughts Press team!

Starting with Issue 11: Stirring Words we are thrilled to have Kim Wagner Nolan and Imogen Hartland on board as in-house illustrators (you can check out their artwork in Issue 10: An Ekphrasis Adventure), and we can’t wait to welcome Stephanie Buosi to the team as an additional illustrator when we launch Issue 12 later this year. Our in-house illustrators will not take the place of artwork submissions and featured illustrations, but will serve to fill out our issues with illustrations and design elements that will allow us to shift further into featuring only original artwork in Little Thoughts Press.

I am also thrilled to welcome three new submissions readers to our team who will be joining us when we open submissions for Issue 12! Thank you to Jennifer Thomas, Anna Llewellyn, and Brandy Bellittera for taking on the tasks of reading and reviewing the hundreds of submissions we receive for each issue.

Speaking of Issue 12, we will open for submissions again on Monday, August 18th, and our theme for this issue will be…

Better Together: A Celebration of Community and Collective Action.

For this issue, we want to showcase the ways we make the world better by working together. A full theme description will be available soon on our website. We can’t wait to see your writing and artwork that highlight all the ways, big and small, that people work to build a better world. 

And speaking of building a better world, I loved this thought from Sadie Maskery in our recent interview:

Once you think sideways about any situation you can find questions to ask that aren't immediately obvious. It's remembering to have that unblinkered perspective. Most small children still do, I think; it's us adults who get fixed into assumptions about the world. It's true, you need to watch out for danger and bad things. But different doesn't mean bad. Some of the baddest things that happen are done by people who look 'right,' and often to the things which look 'wrong.'  So it is really, really vital to help children retain their curiosity. You can be honestly afraid of something without having to hate it.  To stay deliberately ignorant to avoid having to think in different ways, that's pervasive in some parts of the world at the moment.

Photo of an illustration and poem

The whole interview is full of wonderful insights about her poems from Issue 10: An Ekphrasis Adventure and the artwork that inspired them.

While you’re over on the blog checking out Sadie’s interview, I recommend taking a little time to scroll through and be inspired by the creativity of so many young writers and artists who shared their work with us for our Ekphrasis Adventure issue.

Find links to all of our past issues, available in print or to download for free, here. Remember, submissions for Issue 12: Better Together open on August 18th!

Thank you for reading and supporting Little Thoughts Press!

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