Poems from Under a Toadstool by Alicia Bayer

This September marks 17 years since my last miscarriage. This time of year brings back a lot of memories and I thought I’d share them. Wish us luck, and wish us extra luck as Rhia heads off next week on this exciting new chapter in her life.įorgive me if I post a little sap today. I’m also working on putting up a free print of one of the illustrated poems for folks to print out. I offer the magazine for free to do good in the world (just like Magical Childhood), but it would be great if it didn’t cost so much to do good some months! 😉 My half will go to support my nonprofit children’s nature magazine, Wild Kids Magazine, which costs a fair bit to host since it sees so much monthly traffic that we regularly get overage charges to our web hosting.

Half of the profits will go to Rhia as she embarks on this new adventure. It would also help us out enormously if you asked your local library to carry it! If you’re interested, you can order it through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The book was published last week and is available on Amazon (affiliate link) if you’d like to take a peek. That lit a fire under me to get the book finished and out into the world to help her out. Then she got the opportunity to move to West Virginia for three months, and she started working extra hard to earn extra money for all of her expenses. I added a glossary to the back, since some of the poems had bigger words like biome and mycology, and space for kids to add their own poems, drawings and spore prints at the end. So she gave me her drawings to scan, and every so often I would sit and work on mushroom poems (and nature poems, and related poems…). She suggested that I could write poems for a book and they could be the illustrations (many, many years ago I was a poet) and we decided to collaborate.

I fell in love with them and told her they should be in a children’s book. It all started when Rhia showed me her mushroom doodles in her journal last year. Rhiannon Lee ( Annalee or Anna to old time readers, Rhia nowadays) and I have published a children’s poetry book!

Poems from Under a Toadstool by Alicia Bayer