You’re sitting around with your friends at a local dive bar. The beer and the conversation are flowing. It’s late, and you start thinking of those “let’s-pursue-our-dreams” things you should all do together. Maybe it’s “we should start a band,” or “we should run the Marine Corps marathon” or “we should all knock over a convenience store.” Whatever.

Usually nothing ever comes of it, perhaps a good thing, on occasion. The convo digresses, you all forget about it. The next time that happens, think of the editors of Barrelhouse.

A few years ago, some friends, fellow students in the local Johns Hopkins writing program, were sitting around a table at The Big Hunt, having a few beers and lamenting their plight as writers: it seemed that the kinds of stuff they were interested in writing – stories, essays and poems that understood how blurred the lines between popular and high culture had become, stories that were quirky, tongue-in-cheek, and self-aware as pieces of writing, and, most important, stories that were irreverent and funny – didn’t fit anywhere, particularly in most of the staid, all-too-high-minded literary journals that tend to crop up around university writing programs.

Somewhere during an evening the idea to start their own literary journal germinated. But rather than chalk the suggestion up to beer and dissatisfaction, the idea took root. Only a few months later, Barrelhouse was born, first online, and later as an actual print journal.