About TurtleDreams

Former url: turtle-dreams.com / Current url: http://www.turtledreams.org

TurtleDreams began in the fall of 1996. Keeping my contract as community manager of the Survivors Forum on the Microsoft Network depended on my ability to put up a web site. This was great excuse to do what I wanted to do - write outside the Microsoft box that was demanding all my time and all my life. Thanks to MSN's discovery of the Internet, I'd already learned enough HTML to build version 1 of TurtleDreams.

From the beginning I wanted it to be a journal of essays, fiction, and poetry, teasing out the connections between issues of gender, environment, cultural transformation & sustainability. I invited friends to join me as designers, writers, and co-editors. The writing remains, but I let TD stagnate in the press of other work.

Some of that other work is writing, and some is maintaining Manila sites for my job. (Not at MSN, btw. The Survivors Forum is no more.) By the summer of 2000 I knew TurtleDreams needed to be able to take advantage of a Manila format. But it wasn't until July of 2001 I was able to make this new site.

Why Manila? Because that interface is designed for greater collaboration and discussion. Other design advantages are quick postings of updates to the homepage, means to promote discussion messages to story or homepage status, and a template that allows members to get their responses online formatted as simply or elaborately as they desire.

Will the new TurtleDreams be able to make use of these possibilities? A favorite phrase, brought back from Bali, is "It depends." In this case, it depends on whether some of the friends I've invited to collaborate want to join me in this round, whether writers submit stories, and whether you participate. I look forward to hearing from you.

~Cecilie Scott
Click on discuss to post a message
or send email to lee@turtledreams.org
(I'm called Cecilie, Ceelee, or Lee ... among other things.)

Turtles dreaming, green grazing
     smelling salt and iodine
     surfacing to seabird cries
          pelican shadows
Turtles weaving sunlight from waves
     starlight from beaches
     vagrant lights from ocean deeps

Dark dreams disturb the sleep of turtles
     freighter wakes and sonic booms
     aftertaste of petrochemicals
          radiation flickers
Webs of trade binding the globe
     while driftnets sweep the deeps
          in monstrous mimicry of jellyfish

Living at the edge
     between land and water
     life and extinction
like us
     in this precious moment
     between history and
          yet-to-be determined futures

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