genre2 was conceived on a cold afternoon in December 2017 at an old oak dining table just outside Pittsburgh, PA. Instead of workshopping each other’s fiction per usual, three good friends (all three married, but only two to each other, which is good because we try to keep things legal) channeled their usual caffeine and name-calling into a new idea: creating a space dedicated to the knockout work today’s writers are producing beyond the confines of their primary genres.

Why? Why not? And because sometimes you have eighteen free minutes over Christmas break and come up with an idea that’s going to take hundreds of man hours, and you jump in without really thinking things through!

So we asked around, and, as suspected, we found that our poet friends sometimes write stories, and our novelist friends sometimes draw pictures, and the essayists we half-know from Twitter also do acrobatics (these people haven’t been super helpful for the journal, but they’re still very cool). And not only do they produce this other work, but they’re also siked about the chance to get it out into the world….

Fast forward nine months, and you’ve got genre2 in the flesh. Well, sort of. We launched our first online issue on Sept. 15, 2018, and we couldn’t be prouder of the thirteen poems, stories, pieces of nonfiction, and visual works of art produced by our fourteen talented contributors.

Now the plan looks something like this:

• publish a few issues per year. How many, exactly? Hard to say. At least two, maybe more; that will depend on how many awesome subs we get and how fast we get them. We solicited the majority of pieces for the first issue, but moving forward we hope our inbox fills up like crazy with the work of wonderful people we’ve never met (hint, hint: this means you).
• showcase a diverse range of talent. We want work from individuals of every identification and working in every genre. If you can get it to us in an email and we can display it on a website, we promise to look at it. Nothing pornographic, racist, homophobic, or otherwise awful, please.
• take submissions year-round. We don’t charge fees for those submissions, and we don’t plan on doing so. We’ll respond as quickly as we can, but definitely within 3 (or 4) months. If we're slower that that, we’re sorry, and you can chide us.
• promote our authors/artists on social media. Publish a story? Win a prize? Bring a human into the world? Send us your awesome news—we want to share your successes with the interwebs.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned as this story gets much, much longer!