Officially, KanMoWriCo was launched as an independent organization on March 13, 2024, but our long-time members know we have a much longer history than that. For those who are just joining us, here is a brief introduction to the history of the Kansas-Missouri Writers Collective!

1999-2010

KanMoWriCo began as a regional group of National Novel Writing Month, an organization which hosts a challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November. NaNoWriMo was started in California in 1999 with twenty writers and spread to Kansas City the next year, when at least one person, Cylithria Dubois, participated and won. Soon, NaNoWriMo was all across the country and even the world. The organization divided its participants into regions and appointed Municipal Liaisons (MLs) who organized events in local cities. These MLs organized write-ins, moderated the forums, and generally supported participants in NaNoWriMo. 

Kansas City was formed as a region early on, beyond any current members’ remembrance. Cylithria Dubois became one of the first MLs of the region and worked at NaNoWriMo HQ for some time. It’s likely that she gave the region its nickname, Kansas-Missouri Writers Collective, since no one now remembers where that name originates. 

During this time, many of our practices were established. The word “write-in” for an event where writers get together and write for a period of time was coined by NaNoWriMo participants. Users naturally began to create “word wars” and “word sprints”: methods of writing as much as possible in short periods of time. It was either Cylithria Dubois or our other earliest ML, poetT, who established one of our most beloved traditions: The Traveling Marathon of Doom, or TMOD. As the story goes, this all-day write-in crawl to different coffee shops was originally named The Traveling Marathon of Awesomeness in 2007. By the end of the day, its participants had rebranded it to the Traveling Marathon of Doom, and the name stuck.

2010-2020

In the early 2010s, NaNoWriMo and KanMoWriCo flourished. During November, writers met every day of the week either in person or online to write, commiserate, and goof around. The feeling at write-ins was usually one of giddy, chaotic creativity. The Writers Place donated a wonderful space in the house they owned in Westport for KanMoWriCo to use for Kickoffs (pre-November launch parties) and Thank-Goodness-It’s-Over parties (celebrations at the end of the month). In addition to regular in person meetings, KanMoWriCo was already accustomed to virtual events in an IRC chatroom, ChatNaNo, run by an ML in another state, utoxin. This chatroom came equipped with Timmy, a bot which ran word wars and created general chaos. Periodically, raptors were generated by the chatroom and would raid other regions’ chats, bringing more raptors with them–or losing raptors to the other regions. This is where our mascot, a plastic velociraptor named Chance the Raptor, came from! (Chance now lives in Billings, Montana with former ML, Emily.)

In 2016, KanMoWriCo, as the Kansas City region of NaNoWriMo, hit its peak. 786 writers participated in NaNoWriMo in Kansas City, and we never reached that number again. Change kept coming. The Writers Place lost their house in Westport and no longer had rooms to share after 2017, which splintered the community geographically. In 2019, NaNoWriMo launched a new website that many users never really warmed up to.

In 2020, all NaNoWriMo events went virtual, radically altering the experience of the challenge. Luckily, KanMoWriCo had always hosted multiple virtual write-ins per week, so moving to virtual programming was a relatively smooth transition. The in person kickoff, Thank-Goodness-It’s-Over Party, and TMOD were sorely missed, but the MLs kept going, trying out Zoom, ChatNaNo, and the KanMoWriCo Discord server, which was created that year for the pandemic. The two MLs at the time, Joanie and Emily, pressed on with the simple goal of keeping the region alive for when events came back.

2020 Onward

2021 saw no in person events again, further depressing group participation. It was not until 2023 that November programming reached participation levels that Kansas City enjoyed before 2020, and it wasn’t until this year that the “off-season” write-ins on Sundays began to return to pre-pandemic attendance – and then to surpass it after surprising changes.

In 2024, there were abrupt shifts in NaNoWriMo. At the end of 2023, the forums were shut down in response to allegations of moderator misconduct, leading to a general shakeup in the organization management. Many of the changes were necessary, including background checks for all volunteers, but new guidelines also denied KanMoWriCo the ability to use NaNoWriMo’s trademarks and the ability to fundraise for the region, as well as reducing NaNoWriMo’s involvement in group moderation. It became evident after communications with the interim executive director that volunteer concerns would not be heard. Facing this, Joanie, one of the last MLs for KanMoWriCo, conferred with Bee and Natalie about the future of the group. The three decided that NaNoWriMo was no longer offering anything that KanMoWriCo couldn’t manage on its own and, with the recent scandals and an uncertain future, it was time to depart. 

Community support for this move was robust. Participants were equally concerned with the changes and excited for new growth. The Sunday write-ins began to see greater numbers than ever, and participants donated their money to meet the group’s needs. KanMoWriCo carries on some traditions of NaNoWriMo: we still have write-ins, we still do word sprints, and we still plan month-long challenges for our writers. The history of KanMoWriCo is with NaNoWriMo, but our future is wide open. We carry with us the value of uninhibited creativity and the goal to show as many people as possible that they can set aside their fears and self-doubt and write.