OW was founded in February 2007 by five underground authors with a similar drive for outsider writer activism/advocacy. Why OW? Because being an underground writer can be painful.
We had been members of the same organization, but felt the need to create our own space...my space, not your space, not their space, and certainly not outer space...heck, we wanted a room of our own (we heard the Wolf at the door!)
At first we simply were emailing each other. Three of us living in Canada, but in different Provinces, while two of us still live in the United States, and do not have socialized medicine. Over the course of a week, the emails evolved from a discussion of why we had left the other organization and into a plan to create a group that met our needs, desires and fetishes. Actually, evolved is not quite the word: explosive birth is more like it.
Soon we had agreed without even realizing it that we would form a new organization, and were debating the name. OW was an early favourite (Outsiders Writing) but GOLO (Guild of Literary Outsiders) sounded...well, more organized. Just as quickly, one of the Canadian members/instigators set up this website, and one of the American members/instigators set up a forum on which we could confuse each other by discussing the same topic on fourteen different threads.
We had come of age!
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Our Mission 
