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  • From: Lon Rombough <lonrom@hevanet.com>
  • To: NAFEX <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] writing for POMONA
  • Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:35:18 -0700

There have been calls for more NAFEX members to write for POMONA recently. That it should be hard to get material for POMONA is ironic when you consider that the first issues were simply the collected letters a group of fruit enthusiasts had been writing to each other. The letters were gathered up and printed in a little magazine simply because the process of passing letters from one to the next to the next was getting too unwieldy due to the number of people involved.
As POMONA developed into more of an actual magazine, people began to work harder to "polish" what they wrote for it, until many of the articles began to look pretty professional. Such articles look nice, but there's a lot to be said for a letter.
When you write a letter to your aunt Matilda telling how you spent the morning digging a hole for the new tree you are planting, you talk about how it felt to get into the soil, about all the bugs you found, about how you went to the nursery and talked to the salespeople until you were satisfied that the variety was right for you, how you tamped the soil and mulched the tree, and how good it felt to take a nice shower when you were done. That's sharing the experience and all the little details people can identify with. Not only that, but when you write that way, you probably include little things that might give a clue to the reader about something THEY need to do or look out for when THEY plant a tree (or whatever the activity is).
Professional articles are nice, up to a point. When I write something for sale, I have to write it to suit as much of the entire audience as possible. When you write a letter, you are writing just for the reader. That is, your conditions and situations are NOT going to be the same for everyone, or even for that many, but what you write may be JUST what a few people really need that they won't find anywhere else. Not everyone in the country can grow every fruit and nut. Many of us can't grow more than a fraction of the ones covered by NAFEX.
In short, share YOURSELF and YOUR experiences. You may be writing just what someone else needs to get growing.
-Lon Rombough




  • [NAFEX] writing for POMONA, Lon Rombough, 10/25/2004

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