Dear editors and Freya Ray:
I read with great interest Freya's article "Clean House Spiritually for the Dark Time of the Year," on page 10 of the Widdershins Yule 2002 issue.
In particular, I was intrigued with the instruction to the reader in the first paragraph of this article: "Insert your favorite rant here."
Well, I'm just a small-town country boy and don't always understand big-city terminology like "rant," so in place of "rant" I mentally substituted "word."
Specifically, the "word" I chose to substitute in at that point in your article was "kumquat."
I have always liked this word, as just on the basis of how it sounds it never fails to make me laugh. According to the dictionary, a kumquat is the small, orange-colored fruit of a citrus tree that grows in China and Japan, but to me this word has always seemed like it should mean so much more. I don't know exactly what, of course, but something.... In fact, sometimes when I read books like Dune I imagine an army of kumquats thundering majestically across the shifting sands of that harsh desert planet, though the specific imagery is quite nonspecific.
In any case, thank you again for this fine article, and for taking the bold step of offering readers the chance to insert the word of their choice in the midst of your own writing. I certainly appreciated this kind gesture and hope that the literary community seizes upon it; at the risk of pointing out the obvious, without the ability on the part of readers to insert random words of their choosing into the material they are reading, reading becomes an entirely passive activity, no better than television. The ability to insert words that they happen to like makes reading an interactive activity, and much more engaging to readers.
Freya and Widdershins, please keep up the good work!
Sincerely,
An avid reader