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My Work in the Winter 1989 issue of The Barn-Red Door

2 min readMay 20, 2025

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by

John J. Dunphy

I can’t recall how I learned of The Barn-Red Door, which was published out of Peoria, Illinois. Many Americans in 1989 still didn’t have computers. It looks as though this literary journal was produced by photocopying.

The Winter 1989 edition contains an entire page of my early work — emphasis upon early. The only haiku is “Bus Stop,” a narrative-style sequence. All the other poems are non-haiku.

My poems are replete with typos that were not in the typed pages I submitted. Yes, typed. In 1989 I was still using the West German-made Adler portable that I had used in high school, college and grad school. l didn’t begin using a computer until the mid-1990s during my first marriage. The typos occurred when the staff retyped my poems to fit their format. I manually corrected them when I received my three contributor’s copies. Who else remembers writing for copies?

So why did I unearth The Barn-Red Door from my cluttered archives? At 71, the clock is ticking. I want scholars and the general public to have access to all my work — even the early stuff that isn’t all that good. Authors shouldn’t disown their work anymore than parents should disown their children, even the ones that didn’t turn out that well.

In any event, here are my poems. Judge them gently. Please keep in mind they were written by someone who no longer exists.

Here is the cover of this issue.

  • Dunphy is a writer and poets. He owns The Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, IL.

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John J. Dunphy
John J. Dunphy

Written by John J. Dunphy

John J. Dunphy owns The Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, IL USA. Google him to learn more about this enigmatic person who is such a gifted writer and poet.

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