ABOUT THE MOONSPEAKER

In very brief, The Moonspeaker is a journal of writing about four major topics: Feminism, Amazons, Indigenous issues, and languages. 'Journal' in this case means something more like a literary publication that presents a bundle of pieces of different lengths and maybe even in different genres on a regular basis. But an even better way to think of The Moonspeaker might be as a sort of extended portfolio, because it isn't just about the text. It's also about web design and working on an approach to web pages that puts text back in the front and centre, while experimenting with different ways of constructing the text itself.

Admittedly, this is not where The Moonspeaker started out. It was preceded, eons ago in internet time, by probably one of the ugliest personal websites that was ever built, today owned in all its grotesqueness by a free web space provider with predatory terms of usage. The site was ugly first because it was a way for me to learn how to write html and build web sites, second because it was designed on a laptop with a three-grey screen. Officially the laptop had a four-grey screen, but since it was impossible to tell two of the greys apart, three was what it was in effect. And of course, in real life, the 'greys' were purple. Mercifully, even I can't remember what I called that site or how to get to it, if it even still exists. The first glimmerings of The Moonspeaker happened unexpectedly under miserable conditions over ten years ago. At that time, I was working on the tail end of a physics degree, and dealing with a crisis.

I was isolated, exhausted, and depressed. Worse yet, I was doing the 'sensible' thing, working towards an oil patch job, and hadn't written much since high school. A whole range of lousy circumstances of my own came together, plus the suicide of one of my classmates, and I finally found myself forced to reexamine what I was doing. Not that this was a conscious thing at first, it wasn't. But in my initial flounderings, while surfing the internet for who knows what reason, I stumbled into what its denizens fondly call 'the Xenaverse.' It was what got me writing again period, and eventually to working on the core topics of this website.

The first version of The Moonspeaker simply provided consistent, easy access to whatever X:WP fanfic or original fiction I was writing at the time, plus my book on Amazons. Mind you, that wasn't my whole motivation at the time. In the back of my mind, it was probably also a back up of all my writing, in response to the theft of my first computer and the discovery that all my back ups were unreadable without it, which meant every piece of writing that hadn't been printed, emailed, or posted somewhere was gone. It hasn't been easy; sometimes updates have been few and very far between, real life being what it is, and the site has almost died for good on at least two occasions, due to encounters with bigotry, personality attacks, and paranoia in on-line communities I expected to be at least neutral, if not positive, groups to be involved with. Even now, being older and a bit wiser (I hope), it boggles my mind how much homophobia, sexism, and racism people are willing to spend their energy and time on in hopes of silencing others. Such efforts strike me as being oddly like my experience of reading Baudrillard. It didn't feel like reading so much as dealing with someone screaming violently at the wall in an empty room.

So you could say that The Moonspeaker, even more than it is a journal or an extended portfolio, is a means by which I refuse to be silent — and a demonstration that I've definitely got better things to do than scream at a wall in an empty room.

**** Alexiares