Issue 25 Preview: Dear Reader (Holy Shit We’re 20 Years Old)
The Big Hunt, Washington, DC (RIP)
Note: This is the Dear Reader letter from our latest print issue, number 25, which you can and should order right here.
Origin story: four writers in a bar.
None of us have published anything yet, although we are trying, writing our stories and sending them to each other and then meeting at the Big Hunt in DC’s Dupont Circle to talk about what’s working, what’s not, maybe the story starts here, maybe it ends there. Further into the evenings, the conversation ranges into whatever we’re reading, watching, listening to—the new season of The Wire, the moody indie soundtrack to that Scrubs guy’s movie, what is this new thing called Facebook? A few more beers in, we talk rejection, the places we’re sending our stories, how it doesn’t seem like there are many outlets where the editors might be having these same conversations about pop culture and writing, how the whole landscape just doesn’t seem like much fun at all. Hey, one of us says, too many beers in now: What if we started our own literary magazine?
Flash forward twenty years and this issue you’re holding is number 25. Do the math and you can see that we have not exactly hit our frequent goal of two issues a year. Mathematically, we have failed rather spectacularly. Twenty years as an independent literary organization have taught us a lot, though, and one of those things is to appreciate this rather obvious fact: we are still here.
Another fact that’s probably obvious to anybody reading this: it is really fucking hard for an independent literary magazine or small press to be here at all. If literary magazines age in dog years, then we are 140 and that feels like about the right age to have seen so many changes in this landscape, to have watched so many well established, well run, awesome literary magazines and small presses fall by the wayside for one reason or another.
So we are surprised and proud to say that we are still here and we’re a whole lot different than that group of guys who sat at the Big Hunt brainstorming names—Mixtape, Impolitic, The Rock Creek Review, Barrelhouse? We knew nothing then, but we figured some things out along the way.
We kept the print magazine going through lean years when we regularly ponied up a few hundred dollars each for printing, like a large bar tab we ran up 1.25 times a year. We started a conference and one thing went very wrong every year until one year it didn’t, and that is how we learned to run a conference. In much the same way, we learned how to run a small press, a chapbook press, a podcast, a writing retreat.
Most importantly, we were lucky enough to find new people, or for them to find us, people who brought new and different ideas and perspectives to the table. Some of those new people are not so new anymore and have been running this thing for years. Some of them have come and gone on to other things. Some of them, like Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo and Lauren Holguin, who stepped in and edited the fiction for this issue, are pretty new to us in the scheme of things (us being, you know, old and all), and the fiction in this issue is testament to the value of handing over the keys to new, awesome people.
Speaking of awesome people, we’ve been lucky to publish hundreds of writers over these past twenty years, here in print and also on our website, and now in our newsletter (where you can get original writing delivered to your in-box, along with all the Barrelhouse news fit to send in an email, without any meddling billionaires in between us). The whole reason we got into this in the first place, along with possibly a few too many Brooklyn Browns, was to create a home for funny, sad, weird stories, poems, and essays. Out of everything, we’re proud that this thing has put so much wonderful writing out into the world.
Thanks also to you, a person who bought a physical copy of an independent literary magazine. We’re happy we’re still here, and you’re still here, and there is still amazing writing coming in from all directions, funny sad weird stories poems essays like the ones we hope you’ll enjoy in this issue. Thanks for helping to keep this thing going for a little while longer.
Stay weird, friends.
Becky, Chris, Christina, Dan, Dave, Erin, Joe, Lilly, Matt, Mike, Tara, Tom, and Tony