Initially, there were to be two newsletters. One, the Agora, was to cover events and projects in the entire Pagan community. The other, the Half Moon Gathering (*), was to be focused on some of the non-monotheistic traditions that have, in our eyes, been given short shrift in the local community. These would be those originating in Southern Europe, Latin America, North Africa (1), and the Middle East, as well as Judeo-Pagan and Christo-Pagan traditions rooted in these areas. For far too long, too much of local Pagandom had been a frequently hostile, Teutonic Northern Europeans only club, with a handful of African-Americans invited to stave off charges of racism and maybe a few Celts let in for color. The need to introduce a little balance had presented itself.

Very soon, the second newsletter was on hold. What we discovered, was that there was next to no non-Wiccan "Pagan" community to find, making the whole effort premature. As for the first, we quickly found a dire shortage of publishable material. The community just didn't seem to have much to say on much of anything.

What sort of article would we have accepted? It would be easier to start by saying what we wouldn't have accepted. We were a low budget operation, even by Pagan standards, so no pictures, as we would have no way of printing them. We wouldn't have printed material that was not specifically "Pagan" in nature. Nor will we have accepted partisan material connected to local infighting. Advocacy of violence and felonious acts would have been straight out.

In the case of even the general newsletter, no Wiccan, or Witchcraft related material of any kind, for a while. These traditions (in Pagan settings) had been grossly overexposed at the expense of "Non-Witchy" traditions. No articles about Alternative Medicine, Atlantis, UFOs, or other, "New Age", "fringe science" type topics. Conscious Choice already covered these and they weren't really Pagan topics, anyway. Paganism, as we have defined it, is a branch of religion, so anything completely non-religious in character, would have been off topic.

What would we have accepted? Really, darn near anything, as long as it was well written and argued and was in our area of focus. Descriptions of rituals? Perhaps, but only if the author had an interesting metaphysical theory behind the ritual and could explain it in the article. (If she ran out of room, we did have a website with a LOT of free space). Fiction? Philosophy? Recipes?

Cool, cool, cool. Any of these would have been welcome, had they only been available and quality, not popularity, would have been the only issue.

As we stated earlier:

"We should remind the reader, at this point, of our neutrality in disputes. For this reason, there is no ideological litmus test for acceptance. You may see material in the newsletter that offends you. It may very well offend us. If that bothers you, write a rebuttal, but understand that the 90s are over and we're just not going to do censorship. We're aiming for a relatively free and open forum. Don't expect it to be child safe, or politically correct, or "sensitive".

We're hoping that the first issue of this VERY LOW budget (read : photocopied pages stapled together) publication will be out in January. If you're interested in helping out on a relatively "anything goes" kind of publication, write to us at (address deleted), and we'll set up a meeting."

The lack of censorship was the whole point to getting the newsletter going, and there was more than a little support for this. As I mentioned on out internal mailing list, there had been complaints from owners of local bookstores that the old newsletters (especially the Round Table) had taken 'inoffensiveness', to the point of becoming unreadably dull. There was a general agreement that this would be the fate of any newsletter edited with the goal of angering nobody, and I was told that as long as adult or hate oriented material was absent, political incorrectness would not be a problem for them.

In fact, even the hate-oriented material seemed to be a negotiable issue for some of the booksellers, after I assured them that it would be absent from the proposed publications.

What followed was frustration. As proved typical in the Pagan community, while everybody wanted to complain that work wasn't getting done on any community newsletter, nobody seemed eager to volunteer to do any of it. A month or two after the posting of this blurb, MyEzMail.com stopped forwarding mail, but didn't start bouncing it, with the result that letters sent to us were disappearing into oblivion without anybody knowing that they had done so.

Instant moral: don't do business with free e-mail forwarding companies. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Oh, and as we mention elsewhere, I could have found a better place to recruit new members than the Pagan Expo or online. Serves me right.

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