When my co-editor Bill Timberman and I talked, we said "let's rethink what it means to have a magazine on the Web." We saw that print forced magazines into a periodical format. They had to be published as issues. And we saw that this wasn't necessarily true on the Web; you could have a periodical that didn't have separate issues as such. Having issues on the Web is artificial; there is no economic imperative for it, the way there is in print. You can do things that way or experiment something new. So we're free to do what we want -- experiment with form. Why not have separate small magazines, each linked out to its own audience? Our interests have always been broader than most, even when we did the original AfterNoon. We brought writers together with artists, with people interested in politics and spiritual stuff, even in the seventies. All these people were in separate worlds.

We also had a vision of a cyber-platform where people come and do different things when they were in different moods. So our Website would have separate rooms or spaces -- different magazines and discussion areas. We liked the idea of different places; going different places to do different things -- it felt right.

Where does the name come from?

Bill said, "Come up with something to call it, and we're off." I played with words, thought about what we were doing. We planned a site that would be heterogeneous, where the connections wouldn't be obvious. It would be broad, but not complete -- we didn't have the resources to fill in all the gaps. I thought about what we were really trying to do, and came up with the "Motley Focus Site". Bill said, "that's great, but I hate the word 'site' -- call it something else." I said, "OK, Locus. We'll call it the Motley Focus Locus."

It was necessarily idiosyncratic, irregular and personal -- in a word, motley. The parts didn't seem to relate.... They were disparate and mixed up, like our lives. I'm a bartender, poet, craftsman -- Mr. Mom -- who writes on philosophy and psychology, and does odd jobs. My idea of quitting my job and writing the great American novel didn't work out too well. My life is motley. Even when I was an audio-visual writer-director, I wrote poetry, did the drawings you now see on the Motley Focus. I went around to check out various gurus, practiced Zen meditation. Bill's a library worker, computer whiz, poet and essayist, a sort of semi-manager of an apartment building. I think most people's lives are motley, and very complex -- that's one reason for the anger and frustration we see in public and private life -- our real circumstances are not reflected in the calculations of our leaders, or in the press.

What theme binds them into one?

We bind them together, the personalities of the site's variegators and writers and artists. What do French movies have in common? Can we put our finger on it when we actually look at them? Yet there is something beyond the stereotypes.

It is also true that our central feeling/idea is to take a stand, but not in a political sense. I don't mean it in a melodramatic way. Our activism was utterly unplanned. A poet whose poetry we turned down twice wrote me and said: "Were being censored on AOL, our poems are disappearing, we need help from some who knows the Web." We said,"yes we'll help." And that grew into AOL Banned Poetry Dispute Archive. We certainly didn't expect to be embroiled in a free expression fight, and be referred to in ACLU-EPIC suite against the CDA, but that's what happened. We tried to rally e-zine editors to the poets' cause. There was tremendous prejudice against them, because they were on AOL. I was too new to the Net to have any feelings about AOL at all.

We hope to stay open to the motley aspect of living, and in time, we'll see who we are. Jean Houston of Gurugate fame (she led Hillary Clinton through an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt ) is a friend of mine. We publish her work. First, Hillary has the right of free association and to believe what she wants, and second I've known Jean six years, she doesn't do seances as was reported. So that pulled me into that controversy. It seems sort of straightened out now anyway.

Do you think grouping these publications together detracts attention from each? Why is this method preferable to lumping these e-zines together in one big publication?

We hope there is a crossover, a synchronicity -- that we've done something, however small, to make cyberspace seem more connected as well as more diverse. That's a conscious aim. My guess is that in some areas there's a lot of crossover; in others we have completely separate readers. Bill has written a remarkable review of the film Blade Runner. When we first opened the Motley Focus, there were days when half the people came on just to read the article. I don't think many stayed to read the poems, but some did -- they went and looked at Bill's poems and stories because they liked the article.

I read a bit about it in the intro section, but how did this whole thing start up?

Bill and I'd talked about doing another magazine years ago. Last April, a year ago, he called and said "I've figured out a way to do the magazine at almost no cost. It will be easy!" I thought about it. I still wanted to do a print magazine, and also I felt lazy -- little magazines were already taking my poems and stories and essays. I liked not having to put out a magazine, to have someone else do all the work. But I said, "OK let's do it." Bill's been on the Internet for many years, and five years earlier he'd helped me edit a long interview I'd done when we were both on GEnie, so we had experienced the possibilities of working on something like this from opposite ends of the country.

Are you and Timberman the only two editors of all these e-zines?

For now, we call ourselves variegators. It's a sort of joke -- "variegator" usually refers to people who streak hair -- but we wanted to shift the focus of what editing meant, particularly on the committees of correspondence. We hope to add more people. John Lloyd acts as kind of field editor for us, bringing artists' work for the Images art gallery. We have helpers, but we'd like more people involved. We'd like somebody to take over the Committee of Joking Correspondents and variegate it, find the writers and so forth.

How old are you both and what do you do for a living/where do you live?

I live in New York City, Bill lives in Santa Barbara, California. We haven't seen each other in three years.

We came of age in the late sixties. That gives us a different perspective -- we've ridden the wave of intense personal and societal change and conflict before. We're impressed with young people today. They face very different problems than we did in the sixties. The AOL Banned Poetry Dispute and CDA fights reminded us of the kind of battles we fought in then -- to end the war in Vietnam, for civil liberties, civil rights and personal freedom. The AOL dispute seemed odd to us, like an echo from the old days. Repression still occurs, but it is no longer the central problem in modern industrial societies. The central problem is making something meaningful and creative of one's life -- and in one's culture -- in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. We just don't agree with the attacks on young people by baby-boomers. We understand why they are made, but we don't agree. We are very optimistic about today's young people.

What percentage of these publications is reader-submitted?

We salted the Motley Focus with our own work (picked what to include of each other's), but AfterNoon is already 90% submissions. I've already taken some of my stuff off -- it's been published elsewhere in any case. And as for the other magazines -- some are coming along slowly. I've written almost everything on Open Tradition, but we're just announcing the magazine now and seeking outside submissions. Most of the material on the different magazines and committees of correspondence will be submitted by readers -- almost all of it. We both knew poets and artists whose work we wanted, so many of the first things we put up were solicited. We publish a lot authors now who are unknown to us. We've turned down some well-known writers. We just read the poems and accept the ones we like. Basically, Bill puts the poets up on the poets' page. There is nothing to soften it -- bios, credits, introductions -- there's just poems, served straight; poems we like. No reason to go there unless you want to read some.

What's the purpose of the Locus?

We're taking our stand, though it may not seem that way. Bill is particularly concerned with the commercialization, consumerization of society and mind, of the psyche itself. Everything is becoming a technique. Bestsellers are techniques for living, self-help books. It's like the sexual freedom we fought for in the sixties and seventies. A great failure was to deal with rising consumerism and commercialization of sexuality -- the porno boys on one side, and Calvin Klein ads on the other. And there are problems, immaturities and so forth. We don't believe in turning our backs on the fundamentals of human life, but we don't believe in going backwards, either; we're not fundamentalists in that sense. We don't believe that you can deal with chaos by returning to absolutes -- simplicity is one thing, simplification is another. We believe in multiculturalism, in openness and diversity -- that's the way the world's moving, that's what has to happen for society to move on. We enjoy the fact that the Locus reflects this diversity, and we doubly enjoy the fact that we didn't have to do anything artificial to achieve it.

Human beings need to make a quantum jump into a better world. We don't know how to do it, but if we don't, we'll see a collapse back into fundamentalism, literalism and the rest. And that's what sets us apart from the intellectual establishment, as well as fundamentalists of all shades, and it's also why we're interested in what's at the culture's edges.

We belong to that faction which thinks that the Web is a major human occurrence, that it will have more impact than the telephone, and maybe even the light bulb. People underestimate it, because it's more empyreal than earlier changes, which were signaled by a physical artifact -- like the big, black telephones that started appearing in people's houses, all those wires. My 28,800 bps modem looks exactly like the 1200 bps that sat on this desk for years. There's very little to key one to the extent of what has happened. One doesn't see this horseless carriage with one's eyes. The whole planet has rewired itself -- it's already very different than it was last year, but people haven't paid much attention. We do want to be a part of what's happening -- it's interesting and exciting. We're having a great time.

How much traffic do you receive?

Our Internet service provider, Silcom, doesn't believe in counters, and wouldn't put one up if we wanted one, but they do send us detailed hit reports. There are so many separate ways to enter the Motley Focus, that a counter on the index page wouldn't tell you much. From studying the reports, I think we have about a hundred separate visitors a day, assuming that they each looked at ten pages or so. One thing that pleases us is that our visitors are now scattered all over the Locus. If we publish your poem or display your painting -- and we leave everything up (at least) a year -- it begins to add up, even if a particular poem gets only a few visitors a day, or even one or two. Even if we archive the older submissions, the work will be available as long as the Motley Focus exists.

Interested in advertising?

We're not against it. We're not ideological. It's a matter of balance. We're not against people who get some payback for their work.

As a practical matter, the ads would have to bring in enough money to be worth the trouble to put up -- and we doubt they would.

Also the Motley Focus is deceptively simple looking. The surface is motley -- funky, and informal -- but the underlying structure that Bill has designed is rigorous and formal. That's why we don't look like other magazines or sites, and that's the pleasure of our site, of moving around it. That's what people tell us they like about it. It's clean, linear, and logical -- as well as motley. The structure is so simple that ads would be much more destructive to the look of our site than on other busier-looking sites.

If Kodak, say, wanted to do an ad (the German film companies advertise in little magazines in Europe), we wouldn't want their logo on our page. We'd do a photograph and a note for their link ourselves. We wouldn't put Apple's apple on a page. I'd draw an apple, and Bill would place it. We'd do it in our own motley way. :-)