T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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reviews, prose, & artwork was the result of a successful collaboration of
editor & artist, friend & friend, open to anything and everything that Art
has to offer.
1998 was a great year for The Cenacle because it was a great year
for me. Because it was a great year for me, it was a great year for my
writing. It was a great year for my writing because my life increasingly
lacked the extraneous. I discovered, in fact, that I could no longer handle
the extraneous— & labored mightily to expel it.
From January to April I worked as an editorial
assistant on the Boston Review, a bi-monthly
Cambridge political & cultural journal. I was given
the task of developing their website, & learned
HTML coding along the way. I was also taking a
class in QuarkXpress at Emerson College during this
time. In April I changed my degree program from
the disappointing diaper-changing MFA to the
Master’s of Arts in Writing & Publishing. Also in
April, building on what I’d been learning, I laid out
much of Cenacle 26 April 1998 (3rd anniversary issue) in Quark, &
founded The ElectroLounge website (www.geocities.com/scriptorpress),
an exciting entity I am still learning how to exploit. In March I visited Ric
Amante in Seattle, my first West Coast trip since 1995, & together we
ventured into the poetry scene out there; in May I went down to Georgia
to visit Barbara Brannon & we checked out poetry nights in South Carolina
& Georgia, & organized a poetry night in Macon, Georgia. I read
voraciously especially the inspiring essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I
continued to refigure and renew my consciousness & deepen my
perceptions with LSD. Art, publishing, LSD, technology, focus. . . my life
was simplifying, integrating, transcending. In the opening of Cenacle 24-
25 I wrote:
I’m pushing toward a greater awareness, toward writing
better than ever before, grounded more deeply in enacting
one simple belief: Tell the Truth. Whether prose or poetry or
fiction, or editing The Cenacle, or whatever, Tell the Truth.
Aside from continuing to publish my Cement Park & Nat Perfect stories in
that issue, I began a new feature called “Notes from New England”:
This series is intended as a gathering-place for observations
of various lengths upon the world around me. It will be culled,
like much of my writing, from my notebooks, and perhaps
these thoughts will be expanded upon sometimes as well.
The Cenacle / 49 / October 2003