Overcoming Shyness & Loving Lynn - A Memoir

Chapter 21: Word Salad Poetry Magazine - A Shared Project

The worldwide web was still fairly new in the 90s. Lynn and I were both interested in poetry and I had the idea of publishing a poetry magazine on the web. This was in 1995.

I had a goal of becoming a psychiatric social worker and I was learning a great deal about psychiatric issues at this time. I will describe this in greater detail later.

Anyway, we were thinking of a title and I thought of a term that I heard in the psychiatric field – word salad. The definition from dictionary.com is as follows: "incoherent speech consisting of both real and imaginary words, lacking comprehensive meaning, and occurring in advanced schizophrenic states."

I had remarked that at one time, years ago, I had struggled to make sense of poetry... like when I was growing up. I once had the impression that poetry was hard to understand. Maybe I just had bad teachers.

This seemed like a good name that we both liked. So, we called the magazine "Word Salad" or "Word Salad Poetry Magazine." I got a domain name online and started creating a static website. This was prior to WordPress and so I had to work with Microsoft Word or perhaps WordPerfect (yeah, back then both programs were equally popular).

I would then create a list of pages for each poem with links on the main page which would serve as a table of contents.

Lynn let me do everything related to the presentation of the book on the web.

I also did what was required to try to get submissions. Back then, newsgroups were very popular, and your internet service provider included a list of newsgroups that you could subscribe to. It is similar to a forum today, but they were more open and not controlled by any particular owner... meaning there weren't strict rules about what you could post.

Consider something like this today. We might join groups on Facebook, but someone is an owner and creator of the group or there are a small group of administrators for the group. Unsolicited requests for submissions posted to a group might get you kicked off for sending spam.

Newsgroups were not like that and you could find appropriate groups where you could find creative people who are writers and poets. That's what I did.

Poetry submissions started coming into our email account for the magazine.

Keep in mind that at the time this idea of an online magazine was very new as well. That is no longer the case.

We decided to publish four times every year. Around the time when we were getting ready to publish an edition, I first asked Lynn to sit down in front of the computer and see what she thought of some of the poems we were getting – which ones did we want to publish?

She said she wanted me to print out all the poems that I got. I did that and she started creating piles for rejects, those we might want to publish, and those she or we liked. She might show me ones she liked right away along with the ones that were in the "maybe" stack or I would look later... sometimes I would start off indicating which ones I liked.

This was really taking off and it was amazing.

At one point, we got an interview with Ben Steelman who is a reporter with the Wilmington Star-News. We sat down together with him outside near his office in town. It was memorable.

We got some submissions from our friends as well.

A similar process occurred when Lynn would edit/proofread my papers for graduate school. She would ask me to print out the paper and she would go about marking up typos or other stupid mistakes I would make in my writing. It's strange how easy it is to make all these errors even if I was a much better writer than might be indicated by some early drafts of my papers.

In the next section, I will describe some aspects of my career. None of that would have been possible without the support, nurturance, and encouragement of Lynn. That journey might have started in the 80s when I decided I was going to go into social work, but it took off in 92. That just happens to be the same time when I met Lynn.