For perhaps the first time in its 31-year history, Washington City Paper plans to let the facts slide in favor of letting its writers’ imaginations run truly untethered. In early 2013, the alt-weekly announced today, it will publish a fiction issue.

The fiction will partially be the work of former City Paper arts editor Mark Athitakis, who will be among those reviewing the fiction submissions the paper is soliciting between today and November 1. While City Paper sometimes likes to think of itself as more of a magazine, its editor, Mike Madden, told DCist he wasn’t sure if the publication had ever run a fiction piece.

But alt-weeklies and one-off stories aren’t an unnatural coupling. The Chicago Reader, which until a few months ago was City Paper’s longtime corporate sibling, has published a summer fiction issue for several years, usually recruiting a Windy City author to judge manuscripts sent in by hopeful novelists among the readership.

If anything, the City Paper’s fiction issue could provide a bit of levity to D.C.’s normally stodgy literary scene, which is fat with dry wonkiness but lean on narrative fiction beyond, say, truly famous authors like George Pelecanos.

Madden also mentioned The New Yorker’s annual summer fiction issue—which this year featured a sci-fi theme anchored by a Twitter-driven story by Jennifer Egan—as a template. But he was uncertain if, like The New Yorker’s fiction issue, if City Paper’s finished product will contain a few bookish essays to run alongside the stories. “I suppose that could change,” he wrote in an email.