Pittsburgh -- Kathy Jo Kramer has a modest ambition: for everyone in the world to hear her message.
"I speak a universal language," the Pittsburgh woman says. "I can explain what it's like to be poor, to be on drugs, to be on welfare, to be a single mother."
At 33, Ms. Kramer is taking her message to the masses via Internet. She is unlike anything Net surfers have seen before.
Ms. Kramer was a high school dropout, mud wrestler, member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang and avowed drug abuser.
She's also a single mother living on welfare who recently graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University's School humanities and social sciences, earning top honors for her poetry.
She reigns over an Internet news group, a bulletin board of messages, that her supporters created just for her. Ms. Kramer rails against the comfortable. Fans have dubbed her the Jack Kerouac of cyberspace.
"Keep it up. It speaks from the heart, not from trying to be cool like many of the others. Don't let the jealous bums get you down," one reader responded.
Her critics, however, accuse her in often obscene language of posting egotistical drivel and pursuing a narrow-minded agenda.
No matter what their views, odds are none of Ms. Kramer's readers share her background. The Net remains mostly the domain of scientists, students, academics and middle-class -Z surfers willing to pay dearly for access to the Net.
"People can say anything they want about me, and there will be some truth to it. But in attacking me they expose more about themselves," she says.
Although she never lets an attack pass unchallenged, her driving force doesn't change -- getting the message out to the masses.
"The world needs to hear what I have to say, that we all have the same fears, the same hurts.
"They don't have to believe it. But I have something to say."
Education has made a huge difference in her life, but it was the drugs that defined her the most, Ms. Kramer says.
"I was a cheerleader who did drugs," she says. "Doing drugs is like a haunted house with a hidden treasure. It's really scary, but you have to go in."
She not only went in smoking marijuana, taking cocaine and popping LSD, she got caught trying to pass phony prescriptions for the powerful painkiller Dilaudid. Ms. Kramer, her brother and boyfriend were convicted on felony forgery charges. At age 19, she was sentenced to five years in a Kansas state prison.
She was released in six months and sent to rehab. She bounced around several drug rehab programs, alternately staying clean and hitting the road with biker gangs. The tattoos on her body record those trips. At 21, she got pregnant.
A few years after her son, Leo, was born, she left his father, whom she had never married. "I heard him talking with his friends one night," she recalls. "Their goal in life was to die young. That was cool for them. But I couldn't be like that anymore."
So she tried education. It had been a decade since she got her GED, but Ms. Kramer enrolled at a community college and excelled; she even spoke at her commencement. Then, at the women-only Chatham College in Pittsburgh, she discovered writing.
"My first story was about a guy who had killed himself by jumping off a bridge. I described how people were impatient with him for holding up traffic."
An instructor told her she needed to go to Carnegie Mellon, which is known for its creative arts program. Only problem was, Carnegie Mellon didn't want her. "The only source of self-esteem I ever had was my intellectual ability," she says. "I wasn't going to let them deny me that."
On her second try she got in, barely. But the school gave her scholarships for her final semesters; she graduated last spring. Her work became the buzz of the faculty. Ms. Kramer became a celebrity among the students, says Nina Sheehan, an administrative assistant at the college. She is now working part-time for the university's literary review.
Earlier this year, Ms. Kramer also got the attention of In Pittsburgh, an alternative weekly newspaper, and created a column called "On The Bus With Kathy Jo." The column is a journal of Ms. Kramer's daily three-hour, mass-transit commute.
Sometimes the column is anecdotal: the cruelty of boys laughing at a fat girl, the awkward movements of a wealthy woman riding the bus for the first time. Other times, her observations are jumping-off points for her ponderings. "She's got the education and brains to go up against these snotty kids who don't know what it's like to be poor," says the paper's editor, Dan Cook.
She began interacting with other Net users while taking a computer class at Carnegie Mellon. It has become her medium of choice.
"I've always written a very conversational tone; Internet is perfect for that," she says. "On the Internet I can write my way: There's no space limitations, there's no editor. Because I'm on Internet I have something that other great writers never had, a direct link to my readers."
She tried to post her work in other news groups, but found a cold shoulder. She did, however, pick up loyal followers, who created a news group just for her last summer.
Her news group posts many of Ms. Kramer's works, including many of her newspaper columns, short poems and longer pieces.
Ms. Kramer also shares the intimate details of her life with her readers, everything from the glass of chocolate milk that broke to the threats by utility companies to disconnect her service.
Since early November she's shared her deepest thoughts on her 11-year-old son's running away from home. He was later arrested for breaking into a house and stealing a gun. Suddenly she fears she'll see a replay of her own teen-age years.
"No matter how much I explain, I will never not feel like this is all my fault," she wrote in a recent message.
She frequently refers to herself in the third person, calling herself Jo. It is a moniker that she uses to describe the various parts of her personality, the sad Jo, the selfish Jo. It's also a pillar of her beliefs.
"The Jo is the part of myself I denied when I was absolutely clean," she says. "When I accepted . . . [that] the rough and tough part of me was an ally, then I accepted my Jo."
That acceptance of her darker side is vital to her literary voice, says Mr. Cook. "Ultimately her ability is the fragility of her soul encased in this real tough shell," he says.
Her readers know all about that. They know her humiliation at living on welfare, the extra jobs she worked to earn enough for her son's Halloween costume, her crush on a rock singer. And they know she dreams of writing her way to a better life.
"I think I need to write a book, my life story," she says. "The world needs it. People think I'm arrogant to say that. But when I'm on these buses, I know how these people feel and why."