The Tangential is my baby. Started in January 2011, it’s a pop-culture website centered on solid creative writing. I strive to write for it every day, and I’m always looking for new people to write about things like 90s nostalgia, Internet etiquette and the wasteland of twentysomething relationships.
As Tangential co-founder Jay Gabler likes to say, “Like Jesus, the Tangential was born of a bloody mary.” It was another stupid frostbitey winter morning and we had all slid down the hill to the nearest bar, a ribs place called Rudolphs, where we consumed breakfast drinks with Nebraska import Katie Sisneros. We had long been talking about starting a website where we could write whatever we wanted. Jaded by the worlds of hard-news journalism, academia and local ass-kissin’, we wanted free reign to do experimental, edgy writing and grow our style as we went. We started The Tangential in January.
The idea is inspired by the literary journalism of Esquire magazine, as well as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and snarky sites like The Awl and The Hairpin.
In our six months, we’ve grown. We went from having about 75 daily visitors to having over 23,000 unique visitors a month. We also got to submissions from writers like local fiction genius John Jodzio and a slew of other talented “litsters.” The best part was that I made a lot of friends who are crazy talented, like Sarah and Chrissy from Philolzophy and Emily, who writes periodically for The Hairpin.
