I learned recently of ABLE, which is a minimalistic GUI editor + REPL for Common Lisp. You download it and run it and there you go, Common Lisp with lots of included libraries, no Emacs trial-by-fire necessary.

This is a really great idea in my opinion. I wish I'd had this a year or two ago. Common Lisp has too many barriers for newbies to get started. Anything that removes a few of them can only benefit the Lisp world.