It's not just we writers that are outsiders, but our characters are too.
Who but an outsider could have created one of the greatest outsiders, Captain Ahab? "Alright what was he outside of?" you ask cynically, your eyebrow arched so that it almost looks like a question mark recumbent. The simple answer: Humanity. It doesn't matter that he was pretty much evil incarnate (or was he?), he was superhuman in pursuing his goal and we love/hate that. Excess in the service of one's beliefs mark some of our favorite characters.
The obsession of Humbert Humbert; the neverending need of Holden to root out and expose the phonies; the desire of Portnoy to masturbate at all costs; the need for Cheever's swimmer to swim across the county, pool by depressing pool. We love the crazies with our own obsession that itself is perhaps story-worthy. And we love them because deep down we think there is something admirable in such purposeful craziness.
It's almost a rite of passage for small press poets (and are there any other in great enough numbers to qualify as a species?) The older, more experienced poets boast about the amount of it they have had to endure. It proves, to paraphrase somebody or other, their testicular fortitude........
“I am writing for ordinary people,” he told me. “I want everyone to be able to read my books. The problem with Arab literature has been that it forgot to tell stories and lost its way in experimentation. Too many novels that start with lines like ‘I came home to find my wife having sex with a cockroach.’ ”
Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany in The New York Times, April 27, 2008
Click below to learn more about OW's first book and the winner of the Jack Micheline Memorial Award.
About OW!
Outsider Writers have been distributing chapbooks in dark subterranean caverns for too long. The corporate presses and literary institutions have no vision. The media is irrelevant. It's time to rise into the sun!
Our Goal: Unite the write! We will join forces where we are strong, eliminate duplication of effort where we are weak and put the power and authority over literature back into the hands of the only legitimate owners: the authors and the readers.
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The Naked Opinion 
