ABSTRACT
A few years ago, when job offers spun the members of our informal writing gang to universities on opposite coasts and points in between, we decided to form an electronic writing group. To its gregarious instigators (one of whom counted computers and writing among her research foci), collaborative e-mail seemed an ideal forum for keeping up serious scholarly contact. Electronic exchanges, we reasoned, would have the immediacy of speed-of-light transmission (when servers were up); the intimacy of a cozy chat among friends; a flexible asynchronicity that could accommodate preposterous work schedules; and technical support from staffs at the four universities that provided us with e-mail accounts. Artlessly, we invited new colleagues, a graduate student, and an undergrad to this democratic, bodiless, genderless, narrative-driven writing space. As a wry comment on all this multivocal heterogeneity, we decided to call ourselves, Writers Anomalous.1
