On a mountain in Alabama, the first Outsider Writer meetup took place.

            It was the first week of August and it was hot and humid.  Not quite the best conditions for sitting on top of a mountain in Guntersville, Alabama, drinking Coors Light and shooting the shit.  But a tree provided shade and the horse pasture seemed to stretch limitlessly.  And everything felt just fine.

            On a mountain in Alabama, the first Outsider Writer meetup took place.

            It was the first week of August and it was hot and humid.  Not quite the best conditions for sitting on top of a mountain in Guntersville, Alabama, drinking Coors Light and shooting the shit.  But a tree provided shade and the horse pasture seemed to stretch limitlessly.  And everything felt just fine.

            It was fun meeting Karl Koweski again.  I first met him in person in December 2003 at a reading in Birmingham I was hosting called Literary Circus.  Karl was the headliner and the only one of us who had an entire publication of his own, his chapbook Playthings.  As someone who was just beginning to have a few short stories published, I very much looked up to Karl.  He was, and still is, about five years older than me and has been publishing his stories and poems since the mid 90’s.

            The Literary Circus thing went pretty well, thought the drink prices were steep and the venue where it was held was a little more middle-class than I was hoping for.  We had a nice write up in the local alternative weekly and were featured as the thing to do on Sunday night.  Of course, Karl was right when he said that nobody would pass up Survivor to go to a literary reading, even if it was ours.

            Nonetheless, we had about twenty people come out and were able to get ourselves reasonably shitfaced.  We even got kicked out of a bar because Karl was wearing a baseball cap (goddamn, why had our redneck asses gone to so many snooty middle-class bars/coffee houses that day?  A sign of things to come, perhaps?)

            Before and since that reading, Karl and I have kept in touch regularly via e-mail.  Karl joined the Guild of Outsider Writers last month and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on a (semi) professional basis as well.

            Sitting with Karl underneath a shady tree, drinking beer on a hot and humid Alabama summer afternoon felt right.  It felt right that we should be the first two members to meet in person since the formation of OW.

            It felt like Outsider Writers was crossing, finally out of the virtual world and into the “real” world.  It felt like the beginning of something.

            We didn’t talk about much worth sharing.  It was a fine bullshit session by two old friends who were glad to see each other. 

            But, to me, what we said or did isn’t the point.  The point is, that afternoon I first began to grasp the infinite possibilities of the Outsider Writers project.  It made me realize that all is going as it was planned, though there never was a ton of planning.  Some of us live closer, geographically, than others.  But geography is becoming less important now than ever.  Still, somehow we MOVE and our fates intersect and here we are, finally away from our computers, engaging in the oldest form of human communication: a bullshit session.

            Yep, in early August 2007, five months after its founding, the Guild of Outsider Writers finally moved out of the virtual world, and into the real world and, I think, finally started to breathe, and shed a skin.

Last update : 14-08-2007 22:11

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