New Personal Web Site

Those who have visited the various links I provide, might have noticed I now have a new personal web site.

As I have reported, a number of changes and developments have occurred in the last week. My new book of poems, Tinted Distances, was released by Turning Point Books, and it is available for purchase from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Valparaiso Fiction Review, an online literary journal that I am co-editing with Jonathan Bull, was launched with a call for submissions, and a Facebook page was instituted for followers of VFR. At the same time, a new VPR Facebook page was also introduced for Valparaiso Poetry Review, due to Facebook’s discontinuation of old group pages like the one VPR had been using. All of these news notes follow the release a few weeks ago of my online audio chapbook, Dark Refuge, which is also available for download as an MP3 or an e-book.

Each of these events involves an Internet presence for literature, something readers have become accustomed to experiencing in recent years. Consequently, I decided the moment had arrived for me to update my personal web site or create a new one. When my university adopted World Wide Web technology in the 1990s, I immediately explored the possibilities suddenly available. Those who were not online in the late 1980s and early 1990s, or who are like my students and too young to know the situation, might not understand how much of a leap ahead happened with ready access to the web for everyone.

Along with some other writers in the beginning of the 1990s, I had been exploring the Internet through e-mail and authors’ listservs or simulated Internet writers’ cafés and chat rooms. Indeed, there were feelings of excitement and adventure in those initial online activities, and quite a few authors I first met during late-night conversations in those electronic venues have become good friends, online and in person, throughout the past twenty years.

However, when the web was introduced, I knew the possibilities for readers and writers of literature would be transformed, and the opportunities would grow year after year. Therefore, I attended an orientation session at my university on web page creation and use of html language. My first project was a personal web site, which would offer the sort of information that might be contained in my office cabinet drawers or on my desktop: vita, bibliography, samples from my books, copies of my uncollected poems and essays that had appeared in literary magazines, schedules of upcoming readings or publication dates, journal notes, memos, photographs, correspondence, contact information, etc.

The web site I composed served its purpose for the past fifteen years. However, in the last few years, the software had become outdated and no longer available. In fact, the product of the personal web site originally convinced me to employ the same techniques and software to construct a more ambitious project, an online literary journal. In 1999, I created the debut issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, which eventually had to be renovated and reconstructed last year with updated software and a new format.

As a result of its aged format, for a couple of years I have been unable to revise or add to the information contained in my personal web site, and I realized, especially with all the other developments recently taking place, this would be the ideal time to create a fresh personal web site, which I have done. This new web site continues to present those items one might find inside the cabinets or on my desk in my office, as seen in the image above. However, I must confide even that photo of my office desk will soon be outdated since a new campus building is under construction, which will house my office at the start of next year, and the building containing the office pictured above will be demolished.

I invite everyone to take a few minutes to visit and browse the new personal web site.