Friends of the Waldport Library

Dangle a light bulb down into an abandoned water tank. Don’t fiddle with your phone in there and tweet. Just write. You can also compose in an empty cistern, or aboard a drydocked boat in a dark, desolate boat yard. Even if you can’t think of a reason to “come out,” you can still squeeze a chair into your entryway closet and rightly write right to the left of the umbrellas. All good places to write. If you find places like that and you can redact your own beauteous, incomprehensible work until you read it out loud and it begins to flow, you will have publishable material.

Fleas on the Dog, a Canadian on-line magazine, is the first place I pubbed. Later, I developed my website joecsmolen.com

So far though, joecsmolen.com, as an experimental publishing platform, has been space-probe-ish. I can only tell joecsmolen.com is alive and transmitting by the Geiger-counter-like “hits” the site gets from cyberspace. When I click on joecsmolen.com’s “Publish” button, I don’t get shot at or grinned at or feedbacked – very often. I do get the ultraviolet-ray sterilized chill of outer-space. 

I want more interaction. So now, I’ve decided to face-off with living people and persons.

But instead of selling my work door-to-door like Robert Service, I’m going to public street events and talking-up my web site, talking-up writing. I was very very leary of this. What would I say? But these people and persons of the street and world have been so generous and patient with my off-hand presentation, that next, I glibly accepted a most unexpected invitation to present what I assumed was writing-related stuff of an evening at the Waldport Library on the Oregon Coast.

And when I showed up November 8th, I found out I was right. The library Staff had everything set up for me. Even as my metabolic battery slowly ran down and I got cold in my short-sleeved “lucky shirt,” but kept reading and answering questions, the people and persons listened and asked more questions and freely subscribed to joecsmolen.com. They seemed genuinely satisfied that they had not been defrauded by the Friends of Waldport Library’s well coreographed promotions of my up-coming presentation.