I founded the web-journal Unlikely Stories, at a flash.net address, on July 1, 1998 at the age of 23. I did not know what I was doing, though I like to think I know now.
The original Unlikely Stories was a monthly, issue-based journal of poetry and literary prose. As now, we strove to be “experimental” and “transgressive.” At the time, our transgressive nature tended most toward the scatological, which is okay too, especially when it’s not. We picked up a few columnists, who expanded our vision to include the “socio-politically aware.”
Eventually, as the web developed, everyone got broadband, and I acquired the UnlikelyStories.org domain, I picked up some assistance and developed Unlikely 2.0, which included visual art, movies, and music. Unlikely 2.0 also continued to develop the sociopolitical arm of Unlikely Stories. In this period (in 2005, in fact) we began publishing chapbooks, bound as pamphlets. We’d publish them on folded-over legal-sized paper, giving them the unusual size of 7″x8.5″.
Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind was an insanely ambitious collection of literature and visual art, totaling more than 400 pages, and featuring a CD and DVD. I am incredibly proud of our editorial work on this tome. Unfortunately, I printed them myself, and they tended to fall apart. Furthermore, we had no distributor. You’ll never find a physical copy, and that’s a shame. It was created in 2010, and with it, we created Unlikely Books, a formal imprint of physical and electronic books.
For a while, American culture seemed slightly less terrible, so I revamped the web site into Unlikely Stories Episode IV, a reference to Star Wars: A New Hope. Michelle Greenblatt was our visionary and beloved Poetry Editor at that time. But both Michelle and hope passed away, and we were outgrowing .shtml pages. So in 2015, I started using Drupal, and created Unlikely Stories Mark V. By now, we had refined our vision of socio-political awareness into an aesthetic for art criticism and creative non-fiction. We continued to use the keywords “transgressive” and “experimental,” and continued to develop Unlikely Books.
In 2025, as our version of Drupal became more obsolete, I started using Backdrop CMS and developed Unlikely Stories Six, which is current. I also sold Unlikely Stories through Unlikely Stories: Episode IV to ProQuest. That deal is finalized, but we haven’t actually transferred the archives over, yet. Perhaps you’ll be able to get an electronic copy of Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind from them in the future.
These days, we use the Unlikely branding for a number of projects besides Unlikely Stories Six and Unlikely Books. For a while, we ran the Unlikely Salons in Arabi, Louisiana, which brought together writers and visual artists. Now, I run a conventional reading series in New Orleans, Louisiana called the Unlikely Saints. If it says Unlikely on it, and it’s literary, I probably founded it. Unless I didn’t, and it’s not me at all. It shouldn’t really be hard to tell.
