Diane Webster grew up in Ontario, Oregon before she moved to Delta, Colorado in 1981. She landed a job at the local newspaper in 1982 and retired in 2022 after working there for 40 years. No, not as a reporter, but in different departments throughout her employment there. She takes frequent drives in the mountains, always looking for wildlife and enjoying the scenery. She is an amateur photographer and has had some photos published in the local newspaper.
Once Diane learned the alphabet and started putting words together, that’s when she began writing creatively. She wrote short stories about her friends at school and enjoyed creating ghost stories. She continued to write stories, but also began to write poetry. The short form of poetry fit her ideas better. In the early 1970s she started to submit her work. In 1978 her first poem was accepted. She was grateful for any feedback editors provided and incorporated those suggestions into her writing. At first, she saved all the rejects she received. Classing some as good rejections (those where editors said something about her writing) to bad rejections (where editors said she was archaic and didn’t have anything to say) to multitudes of form rejections. She has told people that if they can get past the first 100 rejects then they’ll be fine. But Diane learned. She learned that one editor’s opinion or rejection didn’t mean that another editor wouldn’t like the piece and accept it. She grew as a writer and her acceptances multiplied. Over the years she learned imagery and focused on seeing life and her surroundings by visualizing them in different ways. Her persistence and her childlike wonder have been part of her success.
Diane never had any formal training or education with her writing. She is a self-taught poet, learning by trial and error, by editor comments, by reading other poets, and by what sounded right to her. Over the years she has had over 2,000 poems and hundreds of haiku published in the literary magazine field. She has been fortunate to be published in the UK, Singapore, Nigeria and Romania thus becoming an international poet. She has been published in such magazines as Verdad, New English Review, Grey Sparrow, El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, and many others. She had two micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Project one in 2022, the other in 2023, and a Best of Net nomination in 2022. Diane is always open to ideas for her poetry and is amazed when some little sighting blossoms into words. She pictures the images in her mind like a movie and tries to describe what she sees hoping to allow other people to experience that moment when they read her work.