W magazine was hatched one evening in an office on the fifth floor of the Dominion Building in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. We can't remember if it was during the fin de siecle or at the dawn of the new millennium. The name of the magazine had its origin in a failure of the imagination. The massive flying W of the Woodward's sign loomed unavoidably in the near distance. We couldn't afford - in terms of effort, time or money - to resurrect Writing, the defunct KSW organ. We remembered with fondness its editors' caution that writers should take the time to read an issue before submitting work, but we had no desire to be read, and certainly no intention of accepting submissions. Besides, even though anarcho-syndicalist sympathies were avowed by some in our midst, none of us wanted to be identified with the old regime by anything more binding than allusion. The neo-lettrists objected that 'W' was encrusted with calcified reference to the school's vaunted Wobbly roots, and less directly to the swinish Surrealism of the forties. One member of the collective proposed calling the new magazine The Nadir of the W, and pointed out that there already was a rightwing fashion magazine and a fraudulently elected U.S. President called W. Another, a post-marxist refugee from the new left, saw all of this overdetermination as sufficient reason in itself to embrace the twenty-third letter of the alphabet and have done with sectarian squabbling. But we all agreed that it should be inelegant, irregular and undated (or at least difficult to catalogue), free of charge (unless you were foolish enough to take out a subscription or buy a copy at Magpie), without editorials or notes on contributors, and only available this side of Boundary Road.

The first issue of W so completely met our expectations that we really should have stopped. We still marvel when we look at its front cover, so wonderfully ugly, with all its errant letters, slop and tears, and its crumpled, cluttered back cover looking like a handbill for an eastside garage. How did we do it? The print issues, the first five, were less widely distributed than Spicer's legendary J. Going digital was initially just the result of not having enough money to print the next issue. We got used to it, especially when we discovered that, except for the inescapably global distribution, we didn't have to abandon any of our founding principles. And, most importantly, it's still free.

- Ted Byrne