ESSAY: 10 Years Later—The Rise, Fall, and Contradictions of Alternative Online Literature, part 1
This is the first part of a longer, 3-part essay, chronicling the rise, fall, and impact of Alt Lit. Part 1 is about the genesis of the literary movement, its major players, and its stylistic sects.
2014: The End of Alt Lit and Why It Matters
In the fall of 2014, alt lit, a subculture that seemed potentially poised to shape a generation of artists and writers instead imploded in spectacular fashion. Accusations of abuse against prominent figures like writer Tao Lin and editor Stephen Tully Dierks brought attention to possible flaws in the movement, scene, or whatever one can call it (and I will call it many things herein). What had the potential to be a countercultural phenomenon grounded in sincerity and community instead crumbled back into the internet ether that had spawned it.
By then, I had somewhat distanced myself from the scene, focusing on my new job as a special education teacher, which paid the bills better than stringing together a bunch of adjunct lecturing gigs and other freelance jobs while I made little or no money off my writing, which occupied almost as much time as a job. My first novel came out in summer 2014 and received a couple weeks’ of nice coverage from some folks in the media world, right as I was at in-service training at a summer school program for students who had failed global history classes the previous school year.
Two months later, soon after I got a permanent position and the fall semester began, I learned that my ex-roommate, Dierks, had been accused of rape. A scene I had become distant from suddenly came into focus again, and it returned as a rush of media in the form I had originally interacted with these people: on the internet.
The fall of alt lit shows — as much of history has — that within seemingly free-spirited, revolutionary (or “alternative,” if that is more apt) communities and spaces, there is a struggle to keep moral accountability and transparency, as corny as that may sound to some, to maintain the values and aesthetics that connect us.
Always a Scene, Sometimes a Style
Few writers I know would care to be called “alt lit” or associated with it. In fact, as I wrote this article, I put out feelers to a handful of people to see if they’d want to comment. Only three out of seven responded, and one asked to not be named (the other two ended up helping to edit this).
But it’s time to reframe and recapture the moment in time that was alt lit, because in spite of its pitfalls and predators, there was a blossoming of creativity and free thought that no one should be ashamed to be associated with.
“Alt lit” came from the name of a pseudo-satire Tumblr blog called ALT LIT GOSSIP that collected quick news in gossip column format about online, independently published authors and artists, who shared events and spaces in increasingly overlapping trajectories. Few of us – meaning myself and the writers I knew – ever cared much for the term, but it stuck as the media began covering it.
At its peak, alt lit represented an experimentally-minded, online-centered literary movement, often identified by minimalism, humor, and emotional immediacy. It thrived on blogs, social media, and independent presses, bypassing traditional publishing to create a DIY ethos that was about accessibility and rebellion.
Alt lit was also very much online. Until some writers started travelling to New York City to do readings with Lin, there didn’t seem to be much of an “IRL” component to it for the first few years I followed these new voices in online lit from 2007-2009. Editors would spring up from nowhere and create a journal, and I made a few myself (The World Looks Better in Pink and Keep This Bag Away From Children; the latter, like too many artifacts of alt lit, and online culture in general, no longer exists, eaten by the Internet because no one paid the rent to keep it alive.)
Alt lit’s roots in the Internet allowed both the DIY ethos and experimental styles to get exposure to wider audiences who in turn often became fellow artists. My personal interests were mainly in blogs, but for many alt lit artists, Twitter and YouTube and Facebook were their homes.
There were many great outlets for books, stories, poems, news, commentary, and all sorts of creative and original work that blended genres and mediums: Shabby Doll House, Bear Parade, Sorry House, New Wave Vomit, and HTMLGiant, to name a few. There was always a magic to it all that was more present online than it was in person. Readings brought people together, so any semblance of “online” was always a mirage. Plus there would sometimes be hundreds of people streaming online to watch people read weird poems and fictions.
While many of America’s so-called literary authors have gone through the institutional processes of liberal arts schools, MFAs, and/or moves to NYC, much of the alt lit world followed other tracks (your current author, on the other hand, did all 3 of the former routes, but I am an exception). Public universities, or no universities at all, were more common tracks. The internet was the most common meeting place, although this gradually changed as more people met in person, and NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco became rallying points for events.
International outposts also existed with writers often travelling overseas for readings or to meet with friends they met online:
● 3: AM Magazine, Crispin Best (For Every Year), Ben Brooks (Grow Up), and Lucy K Shaw (Shabby Doll House) from England
● Ashley Obscura, Guillaume Morrissette, (This is Happening Whether You Like It Or Not), Walter Mackey (Screaming Seahorse), and Frank Hinton (Metazen) from Canada
● Luna Miguel (Bluebird and Other Tattoos) from Spain
● Stacey Teague (Takahe) from New Zealand
Alt lit events would be held online and require multiple time zones listed for the different audiences who wanted to watch and interact. I stumbled into emailing with editors Michael Inscoe and Ana Carrete when they wanted to publish my poetry and then was welcomed into G-Chats and blog conversations with them, eventually making life-long friends.
Proto Alt-Lit
Beyond any author or aesthetic, the culture of the internet itself was what formed alt lit in its early years in the mid-late 2000s. There were books coming out by different authors who would collaborate in similar journals and webzines: Tao Lin’s Bed and Eee Eeeee Eee from Melville House in 2007, Everything Was Fine Until Whatever by Chelsea Martin from Future Tense Books in 2008, No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July from Canongate in 2007, and Minor Robberies and Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth from McSweeney’s in 2007 and 2008, respectively. All of these authors, and July especially, have many different projects and approaches within their art, but they all clearly were sincere, ironic, playful, accessible, experimental, and personal.
Some authors I see as precursors to alt lit (hereafter called “proto-alt-lit”), are
● Dennis Cooper: his autofiction mixed with depictions of transgressive plots and characters would form a stylistic basis for the fiction of many of the different types of alt lit writers. Equally influential was his DIY ethos, which demonstrated working outside the system both in terms of style and distribution. Although usually signed to major publishers for his books, he was also almost synonymous with zines and blogs. His blogging helped to promote alt lit authors, including me.
● Bret Easton Ellis: works like Less than Zero, Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho each had different stylistic similarities with strains of alt lit. Ellis and his aversion to political correctness and the liberal virtue-signaling of the turn of the century would foreshadow a tension that has permeated alt lit from its earliest days until its present manifestations.
● K-Mart Realists: the 1980s minimalists – Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and others – who presented personal portraits of ordinary Americans. These writers were probably the biggest influence on the early writings of Lin and many of his closest collaborators.
● Existentialists: Almost any author associated with alt lit would have at least a passing knowledge of the existentialists, and also perhaps read many of the works of authors such as Sartre, Camus, De Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. Alt lit author Jordan Castro still references Kierkegaard frequently in interviews.
● Deb Olin Unferth: while there was a slight oppositional posture in alt lit towards McSweeneys and its editor Dave Eggers as faux-alternatives to the establishment literary world, Unferth is an author whose work bears clear parentage in influence with alt lit. Autofictional, minimalist at times, flowing at times, Unferth’s fiction is the kind that has a kind of balance of sincerity and irony which characterized alt lit.
Tyrant Books would eventually become a mainstay for popular online and independent authors in the 2010s, publishing Blake Butler, Ken Baumann, Marie Calloway, Scott McClanahan, Clancy Martin, Megan Boyle, Mark Leidner, Brad Phillips, and Garielle Lutz. Tyrant Books epitomized the cross currents of proto- and first wave- alt-lit style with heterodox aesthetics that all shared an aversion to establishment publishing trends and an affinity for online communities and communication that could foster creative freedom and literary innovations. Language and communication were being brought back to their elemental and raw forms through alt lit. As soon as mainstream media had dismissed it, they then begrudgingly praised it, before again quickly dismissing it after sexual assault and harassment allegations, mentioned above and examined in the sections that follow.
MuuMuu House and Sorry House
All of the core alt lit authors shared a basic trend: they blended alienation, absurdity, autobiography, and playfulness in their works. But the styles were essentially heterodox, even within overlaps and imitations, which were plentiful. The initial writers I mention here weren’t my favorite but they were all socially connected and tended to receive more fame (or infamy) than many other folks I’ll mention a bit later.1
Writers like Tao Lin, Mira Gonzalez, Spencer Madsen, and Megan Boyle made up core minimalist, confessional publishers Muumuu House (started by Lin and starring Boyle, among others) and Sorry House (starring Gonzalez and started by Madsen, who was perhaps most famous for a poem about a cat he wrote that was published in a print book then photographed and posted on Tumblr, where it went viral).
Often regarded as the face of alt lit, Lin wrote early works like Shoplifting from American Apparel and Bed that exemplified the scene’s minimalism and emotional detachment. His initial online presence was his blog Reader of Depressing Books, and he was a connecting tissue between the scene’s godparents – offbeat and often autofictional older authors such as Cooper, Ellis, Unferth, July, and Diane Williams– and its then-youngest and most popular upcoming creators, many with massive social media followings, and some with almost identical aesthetics to Lin at that point:
● Jordan Castro, who wrote very similar poetry and prose to Lin during his early work; eventually he developed into a successful author of autofiction and metafiction, which is very original and entertaining. He became associated with the early 2020s Dimes Square scene, a few blocks in the Lowest East Side of Manhattan that became associated with creative types who had sometimes ascetic and sometimes reactionary (or “anti-woke”) sensibilities. During alt lit’s 2010s rise, Castro was associated with the drug-fueled, mumblecore antics documented simultaneously in Lin’s novels, Boyle’s blogs, and Lin and Boyle’s collaborative films. Castro and I would sometimes hang out circa 2010 because we lived close to each other in the Cuyahoga River Valley in Ohio. He seemed to lose interest in me around 2016, maybe because I talked about politics too much. I had left Ohio for the east coast by then, and he would later leave too, although he still has an Ohio tattoo on his neck.
● Mira Gonzalez, the author of a poetry collection with Sorry House and a prolific and popular microblogger on Twitter, with a penchant for weed and left-wing politics. Gonzalez sometimes seemed to be pacing in her writing – as we all do from time to time– but when it hit, it hit hard. Humor and confession were interchangeable. Gonzalez has taken up a spot as pop cultural commentator with podcaster Brad Listi, creator of alt-lit-adjacent internet hubs The Nervous Breakdown and Other People Podcast.
● E.R. Kennedy: Kennedy, Lin’s partner during the mid-late 2000s who had a poetry book published by Muumuu House after a breakup from Lin, similar to his other ex-fling Boyle who also got a book published by Lin after their breakup. After the allegations against Dierks came out in 2014, there was renewed scrutiny on Lin and his relationship with the poet Kennedy, whom he had dated when he was 22 and Kennedy was 16. Much of this had been openly narrated in documentary-style fiction in Lin’s 2010 novel Richard Yates. The original title for the book was Statutory Rape. Lin and Kennedy had an email exchange novella published on Bear Parade, which made me reimagine what literature could be. It was hilarious, emotive, and absurd.
● Brandon Scott Gorrell: author of MuuMuu House poetry collection during my nervous breakdown I want a biographer present and frequent collaborator with Lin during the late 2000s. He then became editor at Thought Catalog.
● Megan Boyle: Became renowned for her live blog, a literal blog that became a book published by New York Tyrant and edited by Giancarlo DiTrapano, again pushing the boundaries of everyday internet speech into literature.
● Spencer Madsen, editor of Sorry House, which published books by Gonzalez, Das Racist rapper Kool A.D., Richard Chiem, and multimedia artist Bunny Rogers. Madsen himself wrote a self-published book called A Million Bears that went out of print when his cat poem went viral. He also published another book, a prose poetry novel through the alt lit-adjacent press Publishing Genius, a publication which Madsen secured through winning a pool game in Brooklyn against Genius founder and editor Adam Robinson. Publishing Genius would also publish multiple books by renowned poet Andrew James Weatherhead, another MuuMuu House author whose work has had staying power, thanks to its intellect and humor.
● Zachary German, who wrote an ebook called Eat When You Feel Sad and then a hard copy novel of the same title, using some of the same material. There was shift between the late 2000s, when Lin and German both published their first fiction that was minimalist but raw, free and offbeat, to 2010, when German published his hard copy novel and Lin published Richard Yates, and their writing had suddenly shifted to a calculated, unbending minimalism that lost some of the vibrancy that their work had shown just a year or two earlier.
● Marie Calloway, a recent college grad who had an affinity for Marxism and writing that mixed softcore porn with Lin’s trademark dead pan, hyper-minimalist style that he used at that time. Her novella, initially posted on MuuMuu House’s website and then picked up in expanded form by the leading alt lit publisher, New York Tyrant, described an affair with a writer much older than her who was married.
These authors all were in their early twenties, or even teens, when they initially found followings. The DIY ethos, transgressive tendencies, autofictional affinity, and minimalist stylings were common threads running between all of them, in addition to constantly lingering accusations of gimmickry, most of all against Lin.
The Sometimes Anonymous Librarians of Alt Lit
Outside of Lin’s inner circle, anonymous artists were key to the online scene. Peter BD was an author of emails to authors about the authors, often in a manner that was simultaneously, radically self-reflexive and absurdist. Beach Sloth, a prolific blogger, covered books as well as individual stories and poems published by alt lit authors. ALT LIT GOSSIP, run by an anonymous group of bloggers, provided gossip-column-style news and Pitchfork-style reviews with numerical ratings and ironic commentaries of almost every alt lit book, e-book, and chapbook. Marzi Margo was someone I knew from online and then in Ohio, and they knew everything that could be mentioned with the association “alt lit.” I watched the Alt Lit Gossip awards with them and a couple others in Youngstown. Margo knew every different author and editor and book that got brought up for nominations. I realized there was this larger world out there than I could ever consume and experience, even though it felt like I experienced so much of it. Artists like Peter B.D., Beach Sloth, and Margo were able to manifest this idea and represent the way alt lit had democratized art and lit into something where so many people could all be releasing work through independent media, and also at the same time be deserving of conversation and respect.
Next up in part 2 of 3: the greatest (and often under-noticed) alt lit writers, the political tensions that frothed, and the decline of alt lit...
ESSAY: 10 Years Later—The Rise, Fall, and Contradictions of Alternative Online Literature, part 2
Rusty Realism, Outsiders, and Bizarro Fiction
In part 3 of 3, an analysis of the countercultural contradictions at the heart of alt lit's first wave and its afterlives in Dimes Square and alt lit 2.0...
ESSAY: 10 Years Later—The Rise, Fall, and Contradictions of Alternative Online Literature, part 3
The Countercultural Contradictions of Alt Lit
Like any nerd, I have personal favorites who were “not the most well known” and “more underground”, and I hope you like my use of scare quotes (popular among the online/alt/whatever crowd). But first to the biggest names.
[rubbing my hands together as i prepare to read] ooooooh baby
I'm a sloth