Exciting news! WRWA’s Board of Directors agreed at their meeting on May 5th to put the newsletter — The Wisconsin Regional Writer — on the Internet for a trial period of one year, starting with this issue. The Board’s one concern is that some members might stop paying their dues since they will now be able to get the newsletter online. We hope that will not happen, but we will be monitoring membership trends carefully. Our expectation is that the additional exposure for the WRWA from having The Wisconsin Regional Writer online will increase membership. If it goes down, however, we’ll have to pull the newsletter off of the Internet. That would be too bad for the writers and advertisers who will most certainly get additional exposure by having their creative work viewable online. So I strongly urge WRWA members to keep paying their dues.

The Board also endorsed the policy of paying for additional newsletter pages (over a baseline of 20) with advertising revenue. So please advertise your books and businesses here. It pays for additional content. Note that we now have ad rates that provide incentives for those who repeat their ads in more than one edition (see box at left).

Note that I spoke of additional “content.” I have been trying to add articles and columns relating to writing. I am always open to ideas that will interest a broad range of the WRWA’s membership. Any member who would like to submit an idea for an article or essay with a strong connection to writing, please contact me.

Most future expansion of The Wisconsin Regional Writer, however, will be for members’ creative writing—short fiction, nostalgia, and poetry. I welcome submissions. I will publish what space allows and will favor relatively short items (800 words or less—preferably much less) over longer ones. But an unusually good long one might, on occasion, push all others out of the nest. Also, since there are several outlets for poetry in Wisconsin ( Free Verse, The Museletter, Anthills, Poet’s Calendar, and more), I will limit the amount of poetry to no more than ? of the space allotted to creative writing. See page 17 for submission guidelines.

Before closing, I must beg forgiveness from every WRWA member for the extreme tardiness of this newsletter. I had to build it four times. My first build was destroyed in a system crash when it was 3/4 complete. So I started over. When it was almost complete again, my hard drive gave up completely. I had a non-recoverable system crash. So I bought and installed a new hard drive, reinstalled everything, and started over again. Finally my computer just quit. I bought a new one. Gives new meaning to the old excuse, “The dog ate my homework,” doesn’t it? I’m sorry, everyone.

As always, I’m looking for your feedback on any aspect of the newsletter. I continue to hope that you enjoy reading the newsletter as much as I enjoy preparing it for you—the first time, but not the fourth!

WRWA members whose writing is published in The Wisconsin Regional Writer retain the copyright to their work. Submission of your work grants one-time rights for publication by TWRW. Items printed here should be regarded as “published” and authors should make this known when declaring “prior publication” when submitting the work elsewhere. Because of our limited distribution, most editors probably will not regard that as an issue. Finally, the editor will do his best to uphold high standards of quality in the selection of what is printed here so authors may be proud of having their writing presented to the full WRWA membership.