Two thousand and three. I’d been writing poetry almost non-stop for three years, posting it online for at least a year, and was completely caught up in writing. Some of my best friends were online; writers, teenagers, romantics, Christians… much like myself. But, as is the trend with teenagers, their interests change so frequently, and with such intensity, that when they get caught up in something new, they leave everything else behind.
My favorite poetry forum at the time was dying; its admin/creator caught up in the first few years of college and life outside of the internet, writing, and all of the people he’d never met. The other two sites I used were growing so quickly, and turning over members so regularly, it was hard to make any friends, get decent feedback, or even get reviewed more than once or twice per poem. One of my closest friends at the time, “Gothinius,” suggested we start our own forum. “Who are we to start a forum of our own?” I thought… “we’re just bored teens.” But she was convincing enough to not just change my mind, proving that we were the ideal founders of a forum for those like us, but get me excited about it… and by mid-2003, we had our own forum. Our very own sanctuary of poetry.
We spent the next several years constantly writing, reaching out to potential members all over the web, and growing quite well for a small forum with an obvious Christian influence. Our first forum was upwards of 200 members when server problems and a flame war between ideologically incompatible members convinced us it was time to move on and just chance not getting all the members to follow us to the new site. And sure enough, we lost a lot of members, and with that, a lot of momentum.
The trouble of moving, the drama of what had once been a secure place to post, shattered the secure feeling we’d taken so much time to craft and now our sanctuary seemed somewhat tainted. Along with that general feel permeating the site, the core users were finding new areas of interest, as was I… and, with time, the forum slowly just put itself on hiatus.
It didn’t need a mass email or its own thread. Posts just slowed down, reviews were less focused in content and in number, fewer members were signing in regularly… and eventually, it just slowed to a stop… living on as nothing more than a happy memory in the mind of its users of 3-4 years. A mere blip on the map of life. Our main core tried to stay in touch, but due to health problems, school, work, etc… it was just almost impossible, until recently. And while discussion the lack of writing in our current lives an idea occurred to us: a weekly poetry challenge. And what better place to hold it, than our old forum?!
That was less than a week ago, and yet all four of us have not just written something for that challenge, but other stuff in different forms and genres. A shared sense of excitement resonated with our work and we felt like keeping it all to ourselves was just too selfish… and so we cleaned up our past mess and reopened our doors; and we can’t wait to see where we go from here. For we are The Winter Moon.
