A Letter to Planet Waves Readers from Jeanne Treadway

Dear Planet Waves Readers:

I’m a Leo, Leo, Gemini, so I tell stories. This one is a testimonial for one of my favorite luminaries, a man with incredible vision and huge heart, and one of the most beautiful websites on the Internet. If you are one of our fellow travelers who prefer a jet to a train, this is what I want you to know. Planet Waves provides more artists with more air time than any other place. Not only can you send poems and see them up on your screen in a glorious format, surrounded by other splendid art, you’ll get readers who write you to tell you how much they appreciate what you’ve said. By actively sharing your art with this website, you actively participate in an alive, breathing entity which will nourish, support and strengthen your every creative gift. If you like a longer, slower journey, read on.

Eleven or so years ago, a personal health crisis dropped me into the abyss of poverty and I took any job offered just to feed my kitties and myself. One crazy job was to write a diatribe against the Environmental Protection Agency that could serve as the basis for a class-action suit. Research on the internet was my only possible resource and I spent hours chasing down oddments of fact and fiction. I kept running across this guy named Eric Coppolino who had done some outrageous journalism, fighting the state of New York and a passel of big guns about something called PCBs. I wrote the paper, cited Eric a couple of times, got paid and started hunting for additional work and some help with healing my battered soul.

Again, because I was poor, the internet served as my directory of healing potentials. To feed my Leo passion for self-understanding and compassion, I sought horoscopes as a small window into the newly crazy, upside down world I haunted. A guy named Eric Francis wrote a weekly, I think, horoscope and I started resonating with his language and his insights. In one of his column’s this Eric guy said he would give astrological readings over the phone on a pay-as-much-as-you-could scale. I wrote, he wrote, we started talking. A half hour here, an hour there. Seems I was going through something called a Chiron return and a Grand Cross in my birth sign. Big scary stuff that was utterly transformational and with his help I started regaining my balance.

One day he asked me to write something for his website. ME? I freaked and dithered and begged and felt obligated and wrote “Too Dang Much,” my first personal short story in a damn long time. People liked it. People actually wrote me telling me that my story helped them create their story. Their response and Eric’s encouragement buoyed my drowning heart and I wrote another story, then another.

There were a bunch of people working with Eric: artists, poets, writers; many of us were artistically lost in the world outside this safe haven Eric was creating. He suggested we participate in a thing called a “chat room,” where we could log on and communicate with others helping Eric help us. We did. More poems and paintings and articles got created and were actually put up on the web where others could see our art. Astonishing! We were so grateful for this fabulous electronic world that truly nourished us that we thirsted to nurture Eric, Planet Waves, and each other. We fed one another on beauty and dreams, on the belief that what we were creating mattered, and it did.

Eric was doing the whole thing essentially by himself, including healing people over the phone and writing horoscopes for newspapers to earn enough money to eat and babysit Planet Waves. Some of us took over editing the site for three-month stints, others offered archival assistance, one wrote the program which linked every written word with it’s article and corresponding magazine issue. Someone helped with office work, another led an early foray into an online university concept. What we did mattered because it served as the basis for what you see right now, this delicious website that speaks honestly and openly with style and verve about virtually any topic.

This Planet Waves is a thing of beauty. It brings together the very best of each of us and it allows us to be more than one thing, one type of artist. We can each weave all pieces of our hearts into this website. We can intertwine tarot with poetry, expand line art into graphics, document witchcraft as part of history, design outrageously brilliant computer thingees that transparently anticipate your needs. Somewhere in the heady early stage, I discovered that Eric Coppolino and Eric Francis were one and the same. This light-bulb understanding still serves as my greatest example of what Planet Waves is truly about. It is about great journalism, carefully crafted writing, exquisite art, a community of shared vision and a place where creative gifts are safely brought into the light.

My healing process began here and i was nurtured long enough and well enough that I began living as an artist, explosively exploring every genre, every color, every palette of art. Artists can’t hope for much more than that. Neither can those of us who read and admire art.

Sincerely,

Jeanne Treadway