Seniors Annie Goll and Marly Saunders published the first issue of their alternative literature (alt-lit) magazine, the Ash Tree Journal, online tonight.

The pair’s passion for alt-lit poetry inspired them to start the publication.

“We’re both writers and we’ve both been really interested in an experimental genre of poetry called ‘alt-lit’” Goll said. “It’s centered on internet culture and social media. We realized that there was no literary magazine that we knew of that was an alt-lit literary magazine, so we decided to start one.”

Goll and Saunders used social media to promote the Ash Tree Journal, placing an advertisement on Twitter and taking advantage of the Tumblr feature system.

“We know someone through Tumblr who is a poetry tag editor, so we contacted him and said ‘We’re going to put out an announcement about our magazine. Can you feature it so a lot of people will see it?’” Goll said.

They began accepting poetry, prose, and photo submissions in mid-October.

“This past issue, we gave everyone a month and a half to submit and then we gave ourselves a month and a half to send out acceptances and put it together,” Goll said.

By November 30, they had received over 206 pieces. They ended up selecting 25 of the most relevant and timeless submissions.

“We just took the things that we thought fell under the alt-lit category and that we felt would stand the test of time,” Goll said.

According to Goll, she worked well with her magazine co-founder while narrowing down the application pool.

“Luckily, Marly and I have similar opinions so it wasn’t too hard to have a consensus on which ones we wanted,” Goll said.

The Ash Tree Journal  can be downloaded for free from ISSUU. This winter issue is entitled ‘Becoming Poetry’, and the spring one may have a specific theme.

“I think that we’re going to put out a prompt for the next issue telling everyone to write about important places to them,” Goll said.

The editors will post information about deadlines and publication dates on the Ash Tree Journal Tumblr and Twitter profiles.