Underdogs

LET IT BE KNOWN to one and all that the Underground Literary Alliance will ALWAYS be on the side of the underdog, because that's what we are. We've accepted many writers and zeensters at face value, with open arms. (Including some who now attack us.) If we get occasionally burned, so be it. We're not going to change. Our ethics and values stand rigidly fixed, permanent, unshakeable as before.

If I myself am someday somehow discredited, I'd be out of the movement, but the movement would continue on as before.

I mentioned recently the great heart writer Mary Gaitskill has, when she and her friend Tom Beller were in effect collecting underground writers-- Tom for his own amusement. I and my zeen were among them. Both were subscribers at a time I was alcoholic and broke. I remember sending a renewal note to Mary, telling her if she didn't renew, I wouldn't be able to feed my cat (who I wrote about often to her in my letters-- the cat and I went through a lot together, huddled up in a building without heat during a Detroit winter). Gaitskill didn't renew-- I'd pissed her off too much with my rants I guess-- but I did receive through the mail a giant bag of cat food!

The point: Does the ULA have a smaller heart than an establishment writer like her? No way! We'll continue adopting the poorest of poor writers. We'll take up the cause of writers like prisoner Cassidy Wheeler, whom Wild Bill is trying to help. If we have to make him a ULA member to protect him, we'll do so.

We will NEVER back off from what the ULA from its beginning has been about.