North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Jacquelyn Kuehn <jakuehn@verizon.net>]

Lon, in searching for a bit more material (the very subject of this posting) I found this posting from you from a year ago. I assume I may use it, but wanted to warn you in case you were very surprised to see it in print. It is still very valid and up-to-date!

Thanks so much for all your labor for NAFEX.

Jackie

[NAFEX] writing for POMONA
Lon Rombough  lonrom at hevanet.com 
Mon Oct 25 18:35:18 EDT 2004 

<x-tad-bigger>        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
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