Outsider Ink was launched in 1999 as a forum for alternative literary fiction, poetry and artwork. The ezine found a global audience attracted to the quality of the work, and allowed us to expand and evolve over the next seven years, well beyond any of our expecations. In that time, we have featured some excellent work, published a number of emerging voices, and created and defined the term “outsider fiction”. We also got to get on our soapbox and rant and rave about world events.

I have grown exponentially as a writer in my tenure as an editor, and recommend that all writers take a year to edit a similar project as part of their “training”. Helping to refine the work of others will only strengthen your own; it helps you be more objective as an artist. However, I had to make the choice between spending my creative energy on editing or writing, and writing won.

I will be shuttering Outsider Ink at the end of the 2006. The site will remain live through the next year so that the work can continue to be read and enjoyed.

I want to thank all of the artists who have allowed me to publish their work. The magazine would not exist without your contributions. I would also like to thank the volunteer editors and readers who have helped me keep the site going the last two years, especially Sarah Eddenden, Daniel Allen Cox and Michael Graves.

Be a creationist. Make Art. Keep writing.

hen we launched our first anti-war/Bush Administration issue last year, we were still reeling from the events of hurricane Katrina. That pivotal event showed the country exactly what the rest of us had been railing against for years, that this administration was not capable of running the country, especially when political cronies were set up with high-profile appointments that they were not qualified to handle. In the year that followed, the cracks have begun to show in his administration’s levees, and they have the potential of being washed out of office.
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Congratulations to Daniel A. Olivas. His short story, "Hit" was named one of the notable online stories for 2005 by StorySouth's Million Writers Award.

Republicans Rejoice!
There was only one good reason anyone offered to re-elect Bush. He made the mess, let him clean it up. Somehow that’s not enough to justify four more years... At least we’ll continue an unprovoked war in Iraq and line the pockets of big business and the oil industry with the blood of Americans and Iraqi, and bankrupt our country at the same time! We’ll be safe from the homosexuals and their terrorist notion of getting married! Soon we’ll also have that whole abortion issue put to bed, and reverse three “hedonistic” decades of social progression in one president’s term. Maybe we can even ban those pesky museums and start burning books again! Why think when there’s always someone telling you want to do? Thank you one and all, Red Voters, you’ve led us back into the promised land of the McCarthy era and enforced conformity with the “moral” majority.
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The devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, along with the complete failure of emergency services to evacuate people, has made hurricane Katrina the largest natural disaster in US history. However, it is the Bush Administration's negligence of padding cabinet jobs with political friends and cronies, downsizing emergency response budgets in order to fund their "war on terror", and their complete disregard for the trapped poor of New Orleans, that has allowed this disaster to become a national travesty costing thousands of more lives. To that point, we have republished in its entirety an essay by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Victoria A. Brownworth. Read her Call To Action...