“W2010 announces a new formation—both for the magazine and the Kootenay School of Writing. KSW, the more venerable of the two, is 25 years old this fall; W is ten. A new collective structure is in place for the School: a cluster of semi-autonomous yet intersecting “pods” (or “cells” if you prefer a more radical conception), each with its own projects or “areas of influence” (readings / pedagogy / publication, etc). W2010 begins a new conception of the magazine as an annual: this first issue gathers work from the present collective (or perhaps we should now say collectives) written this year; future annual issues will be announced with a themed call, for which work will be gathered and published on-line over the course of the year (see below for the call for the next issue). We hope work will be written dialogically as an issue accumulates: an initial selection of material will be posted, and then responses / extensions / contestations /emendations, etc, as they come; at the close of a year/issue, a print run of at least a “selection” of the year’s material will ideally then be issued.

The work in W2010 might surprise some familiar with the magazine and the School. For starters, there is some fiction here. We are doing our cultural work at a time of unprecedented pressures, as the “long neoliberal moment” (to borrow Jeff Derksen’s phrase)  grinds on, responding to the current market crisis not by a return to some sort of neo-Keynsean economics, but rather, with bailouts for the rich and amped up privatizations. Meanwhile the public sphere—already just a pool of faint light beneath one last sputtering streetlamp—seems set to finally wink out altogether. In Vancouver, this has a lot to do with the Olympics, its hundreds of new security cameras, its 1 billion dollar security budget, and its “safe assembly areas” (outside of which we can imagine the majority of the city as an “unsafe assembly zone”). Beside this we have the provincial government’s concerted efforts to privatize, expropriate, expel, and otherwise suppress a still-vital cultural sector. In such an environment, we feel it is essential to broaden and strengthen affinities, working towards something of a cultural front to face “a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse” (The Coming Insurrection 7). From deep in the collapse, we reach out.”