Welcome to GOWANUS.

If you've gotten here via the GOWANUS home page, you already know what this new publication is about: It is intended as an organ for Anglophone writers in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and (with the occasional exception) anyplace else outside the so-called "first world."

Why?

Well, not because I find anything wrong with the many fine online journals which devote their pages primarily to US and UK authors. On the contrary, I read and write for those journals. But I also enjoy making contact with far-flung parts of the globe (shortwave is my principle medium for both news and entertainment, the BBC World Service in particular), and I sense that there are many fine writers out there who do not have a place of their own on the Net. You could say I have started GOWANUS because I wanted a way to meet those writers, learn about their cultures and give the rest of the world an opportunity to do so as well.

Thus far, the experience of working with the very fine authors who have contributed to the inaugural issue of GOWANUS has more than fulfilled my expectations. I have lived for a time homeless on the streets of Harare; experienced Houston, Texas through the soul of a Croatian ex-pat; been taken on a guided tour of the mind of a Canadian fiction writer; attended a Zimbabwean garden party with two long-time ANC militants; been introduced to one of the fathers of modern West Indian literature; and, certainly not least, suffered the terrible beauty of a friend's death at sea.

If this is not what the Internet is for, then what is?

-Tom Hubschman [email protected]