Brooklyn Quarterly to launch open format literary blog

Brooklyn Quarterly will will let any member of its community register as a user and post content to the journal’s blog. The fully featured blog should launch sometime in November, around the release of its first full issue, according to its coeditors, Jane Carr and Tristan Snell.

The editors will watch reader contributions for interesting content and post the best to its blog’s front page, in a way similar to how lefty political sites like Blue Mass Group inculcated community and incentivized high quality posts in years past

As far as the coeditors of the new literary and journalism site know, no one in the lit world has ever created an open format blog.

Tristan Snell, one of the two coeditors that Technically Brooklyn sat down with at Dumbo’s One Girl Cookies Friday, said: ” A big part of what we’ll be doing with the blog is continuing the discussion from each quarterly issue.”

So they explained that the blog will feature new content, prepared in advance to complement each issue of The Brooklyn Quarterly, and that content will invite conversation from the community. The blog will also feature regular contributors and invited guests, but by opening it up to the whole readership of the site, the editors hope to discover new writers.

The first issue is due out soon. The publication will live primarily online. Whereas many sites use websites as teasers to promote their print editions, Snell explained that this journal will do just the opposite. It will publish printed teasers (such as the poetry chapbook that they published with their preview issue) to promote the writing available on the website.

Upcoming ventures that technologists can look forward to from The Brooklyn Quaterly:

• A photo essay of Brooklyn startups in the first issue and future photo essays on startup scenes in other cities.
• More multimedia interpretations of the journal’s stories, such as this Creativist rendition of their preview issue story, “The Spark” and an upcoming one based on their interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
• Events to inspire discussion and debate about literature, potentially at the Made In NY Media Center, which The Brooklyn Quarterly just joined.
• A first issue release party at Huckleberry. Disclosure: Technically Brooklyn has RSVP’ed.

Carr described the purpose the new site to both push literature to be more approachable while also dealing directly with social issues. She also expressed a need to move literature to the place where people are actually reading, and that’s online. “Reading is alive and well,” she said, except people are doing less and less of it in print form. 

Jane Carr (scholar, Park Slope/Prospect Heights) and Tristan Snell (attorney, Brooklyn Heights) are the coeditors. While no one works for The Brooklyn Quarterly full time, it currently has a staff of fifteen with another dozen or so contributing and advisory editors, according to Jane Carr, one of the founding coeditors. They currently have several open positions.