Long, long ago, not too long before the dawn of the World Wide Web, there was The Newsletter.  

No, actually, well before that there was Buck’s Newsletter.  Written from my dorm room Leonard Hall at American University, it was a way for me to keep in touch with my friends whom I had gone grown up with on Cape Cod and had hence scattered across the country (a group once known as the Cape Cod Commandoes).

It was handwritten on graph paper, and photocopied and mailed (via the USPS) using money I would have otherwise used for weekly laundry.  One could tell when I sent an issue out because I would start wearing clothes from the far corners of my closet and drawers — usually the better stuff.  The joke was that I would start the week off in my regular t-shirt and jeans, and as the week progressed and I ran out of clean clothes, I would dress better in better.  By Saturday, I could be wearing a suit.

The second incarnation was borne out of a desire in my mid-twenties to reconnect with old friends and keep in touch with new ones.  It was still a hard copy sent through the US mail, but with the advent of desktop publishing, I could have as much fun with layout as with words. Sometimes, I would even print feedback.

The content mostly had to do with different creative projects I was working on (Under the Shade of the Trees, a screenplay; Thunderball Comics The Hoe, and a novel entitled The Bostoner), trips to visit various friends and, if all else failed, making fun of Joff (my friend and sometimes roommate). I think it started off with the circulation of 13, and within a few years it grew to 72.  Recipients would say someone they knew wanted to get The Newsletter, to which I would respond, “I don’t even know them.  Why would they be interested in reading about me?”

It was not by accident that these unlike the original readers of the first newsletter, my new friends tended to be, almost exclusively female.  Therefore, it wasn’t too surprising that a few years later that when I got into a long-term relationship, The Newsletter fell by the wayside.

With the publication of my novel, The Bostoner (2000), and my election as Selectman for the Town of Chatham (2001), I was putting my energies to use more organizationally than creatively.  And then Sofie was born and I spent most of the following year or so just trying to remember who I was and why.

Since I became a single father, and before that, old friends and new have asked about The Newsletter.  Honestly, they can be downright insistent if not angry.  “Where’s my Newsletter?”  Their newsletter — I just wrote it.  Joff, most skewered of group, has been telling me I need to blog, almost suggesting that this was my medium originally, with what he’s termed a paper-based blog or a “proto-blog” (I kinda liked Neanderblog, myself).

In the mean time, I picked up an op-ed column at The Cape Cod Chronicle.  When editor Tim Wood asked for a title, I chose “Monomoyick”, as it is both the original name of my hometown, Chatham, and also the name of its original human inhabitants.  But with that “ick” at the end, it also sounds like an adjective, as if something was “very monomoyick.”  This stands in contrast to the current push for the word Chatham to be associated with an affluent, design magazine-based lifestyle.

Added to this was my blog for CapeCodToday, which was first offered to me during my candidacy for the 4th Barnstable district of the Massachusetts Legislature.  When a three-way primary race left me without a campaign, but still a blog on an active online newspaper, I combined my role as opinion journalist with my inside knowledge of the candidates to offer political analysis.

The publication of my Tours of Cape Cod by Schiffer Books means that I’m finally getting to blogging.  Or back to blogging.  It has been a while, but I’ve returned.