Interfictions 2 (44 page)

DS
: I definitely think Chabon has written a lot of interstitial fiction. When
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
came out, I saw it as interstitial, existing at the confluence of historical, literary, and fantastic fiction, all in the service (and this is the kicker) of turning a pair of schlubs who imagined superheroes into superheroes themselves (for a Chabonesque value of superhero). And
The Yiddish Policeman's Union
is like Chandler transported to a different plane of reality and turned inside out, which is certainly a boundary-breaking kind of thing to do.

Consider also Angela Carter—my personal patron saint of interstitial fiction. She always wrote everything: realism; fantasy; SF; weird, uncategorizable imaginative stuff. She was published as literature, I suspect, because that's the only category her beautifully written, thematically ambitious work definitely fell into. For the same reason, the novels of our own Jeffrey Ford have been published as mainstream, even though they are clearly as rooted in speculative fiction as they are in any of four or five other literary genres. His story “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” slides around between domestic realism (yes, really), dream narrative, satire, and possibly one or two other genres I'm not familiar enough with to identify. He might have sent it to the
New Yorker
—I've seen stories just as weird printed there under the bylines of T. Coraghessan Boyle and Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm glad he sent it to us instead.

The bigger names in fiction seem to embrace the literature label over those of genre. Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
and David Brin's
The Postman
have almost everything in common in terms of setting and general plot, but one is strictly literature and the other solidly science fiction. McCarthy's fans seemed particularly resistant (along with most reviewers) to referring to his book as SF. How does the interstitial community build a bridge with publishers who seem unwilling to stray into any suggestion of genre territory?

DS
: I suspect the Internet is going to be our friend in this, because the Internet is all about crossing genres and blending communities. Sure, there's always going to be a large part of the population that is entirely unwilling to step out of its narrowly defined comfort zone. There are far more comfort food restaurants in any given country than out-there fusion experimental joints. It is also true that if you're a big-name anything, the mainstream is more willing to embrace you.

The reason we started this foundation was that there's more power in community than in isolation. Writers like Michael Chabon and Barbara Kingsolver and Alice Hoffman don't have to make common cause with anybody unless they want to. The rest of us, less established, less lucky, maybe less accessible, need something behind us, a passport out of the genre ghetto into the wider literary world.

CB
: I think in many ways this is where the term “literary” begins to raise its head. Very little difference exists in terms of content between
The Road
and
The Postman
, but their use of language and structure and tone does differ. McCarthy's prose is stark whereas Brin's is full to the brim with detail, and though those seem like small differences, I do think that typical readers of science fiction will read Brin's book and feel it meets their expectations (at least in terms of language and detail) more closely than McCarthy's.

How to build bridges? The best way, I think, is to have this sort of discussion, and to create the language necessary to talk about these differences that seem like huge gulfs when they aren't, really. Take, for instance, Amelia Beamer's “Morton Goes to the Hospital,” a metafiction that places the reader in a position of active participation in the imagining of its characters after the last word. It's a sort of story that, while not having much fantastical content in the actual story line, asks a question of its readers that creates a fantastical readerly experience in a story that is mostly about the ordinary lives of two elderly characters. Likewise, Elizabeth Ziemska's “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” feels more like a Margaret Atwood story, recounting personal and family history amid discussions on the nature of time and space and history, a fiction about science (or ways of knowing) that was a delight to encounter in our submissions.

Chris, what roadblocks do you think exist for writers who resist standard genre definitions? What should authors do when their writing takes them into that gray area in the middle? Are fantasy markets the best place to consider for interstitial stories? Or should the boundaries be pushed at straight literary markets?

CB
: I think the roadblocks will be determined by what aspects of standard genre definitions writers are blurring or doing away with in their writing altogether. For example, Kelly Link's short stories were very much welcomed first within the fantasy and science fiction marketplaces. I think this was because, though Kelly presented stories with structures and voices that were often unfamiliar to standard fantasy readers, they still delivered the wonder and magical aspects of standard fantasy. A writer like Alan DeNiro, however, has had better luck with literary magazines like
One Story
and the
Santa Monica Review
, even though his stories use the iconography and content of sci-fi stories. His technique and structures, like Kelly Link's, are not those of typical sci-fi, and neither is his mix-and-match, almost pastiche, approach. He has created his own language, one a bit further removed from standard genre audiences than Kelly's more friendly and open prose. So here you have two examples of people doing the same thing, in certain ways, and not at all the same thing in other ways, and the majority of their (at least early) successes were published on different sides of the fence. (It didn't take too long for literary magazines to catch on to Kelly after her work began to make its way into the wider world, of course.)

So which markets are better for interstitial stories? I think both are fine, but it depends, again, on what exactly you're making available to your readers in your stories, and that will end up being the deciding factor. I think it's best to push at the boundaries from both sides—fantasy and literary publications—and however many other sides may exist.

In his introduction to
Interfictions I
, Heinz Fenkl describes the publication of his own interstitial title,
Memories of My Ghost Brother,
which was published as a novel but is drawn from his life and is in fact the story of his childhood. This brought to mind the books of Tim O'Brien, whose highly successful Vietnam titles wind their way through all manner of nonfiction, memoir, and novel territory. Does interstitial writing dwell also between the lines of fiction and nonfiction? If so, how does it differ from creative nonfiction? If a story is truth but not factual, is that where it crosses the interstitial border?

CB
: Yes, interstitial fiction does exist between the borders of fiction and nonfiction, as well as between poetry and prose. You'll see some of those divisions broken down in several of the pieces we chose for the new anthology. Like Camilla Bruce's “Berry Moon,” which employs a kind of language that hovers between prose and poetry. And Nin Andrews's “The Marriage,” which carries the arc of a full story in the small space of a prose poem, with the evocative language as well as the jumps in logic and time that poems do so well. I think when a story begins to work in a variety of modes and manners, though, as in O'Brien's books, the terms “fiction” and “nonfiction” no longer even apply.

DS
: This is a part of the interstitial forest I haven't spent much time in—like, any. For what it's worth, though, my gut feeling is, sure. Writing is writing, and the line between fiction and nonfiction (and mythology and legend) has always been more permeable than most people realize. Colette's memoirs, for instance, partake enthusiastically of a number of genres, although she certainly meant for them to be read as sober nonfiction. Perhaps that's where the difference lies—in the writer's intent (yes, I'm aware them's fighting words, and I already yield; I do not pretend to be a theorist). If a work of nonfiction artfully bestrides genres, making that uncertainty (Did that really happen? Is this event/character a metaphor or even a convenient lie?) part of the experience of reading the book—well, that's what Stephanie Shaw's “Afterbirth” does, and we bought that for this anthology.

As for the “truth but not factual” statement—well, I don't know. It's what I usually say about folk- and fairy tales, and we all know what genre they belong to, right?

Chris, what surprised you the most working on this anthology? Is there a subject matter or style that dominated the submissions?

CB
: I did notice that there were a lot of politically oriented stories in the submissions, which doesn't actually surprise me considering the upheaval of the past decade and the now occurring change of the political landscape. We selected several of the most interesting of those stories for the anthology, too, and each comes at its subject matter very differently. Brian F. Slattery's “Interviews After the Revolution” and Alaya Dawn Johnson's “The Score” both arrange their politics through a polyphonic display of voices and media. Alan DeNiro's “The Warp and the Woof” posits an extreme vision of today's politics played out on a futuristic backdrop. Lavie Tidhar's “Shoes” takes a magical realist perspective on current political strife in the Middle East, and in “The 121” David J. Schwartz creates a voice-oriented piece about a political event that is unforgettable. Aside from that, there were also a lot of gender-oriented submissions, and stories that talked about race or ethnicity or cultural identity. One of the most remarkable of these was Theodora Goss's “Child-Empress of Mars,” an exploration of the tragic effects of cultural blindness and well-meaning prejudice, set in a lushly described and exotic Mars that owes as much to non-occidental fantasy as it does to science fiction. It was amazing to see all of these stories coming from so many different parts of the world, too, which is part of what the anthology does: it creates a space for writers of varying cultures and nations to come together and mingle their perspectives on the world. So it's interstitial in that way, too, avoiding the standard anthology feature that presents mainly writers working from within one nation, culture, etc. It's an anthology series very much focused on diversity, which is what interstitial writing draws its strength from most, I think. Cross-fertilization, difference, deviation, rather than homogeneity.

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Thanks to all the Interstitial Arts Foundation board members without whom this would still be just a good idea:

Deborah Atherton, Wendy Ellertson, Elizabeth Genco,

Ellen Kushner, Geoffrey Long, Larissa Niec, Katherine Pendill,

Victor Raymond, Stephen H. Segal, Erin Underwood

and to the Art Committee:

Geoffrey Long and Connie Toebe

and to the many great IAF volunteers who have worked so hard to fund and to publicize this anthology:

K. Tempest Bradford, Deborah Brannon, Elissa Carey,

Cris Fisher, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Felice Kuan,

Amy Lau, Emily Wagner

Delia wishes personally to thank Jeff Pinty, Shana Cohen, Christopher Schelling, Davey Snyder, Racheline Maltese, and Tempest Bradford for technical assistance, advice, and support above and beyond the call of anything but friendship. Also Ellen Kushner, for patience and help in every step of this project. And Christopher Barzak, for calm, responsiveness, and excellent good taste.

Chris thanks Delia Sherman for a steady hand through the process of making this book, Rick Bowes for his steady sense of humor, and Tony Romandetti for his steady heart.

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Just as how in nature the greatest areas of biodiversity occur in the margins of land between ecosystems, it is our belief that some of the most vital, innovative, and challenging art being created today can be found in the margins between categories, genres, and disciplines. Because such works are hard to classify, they are often misunderstood in a culture that has become overly dependent on branding and selling art by category labels. Border-crossing works of literature, for example, which consciously borrow tropes and themes from both genre and mainstream fiction, are classified as one or the other—and then critiqued according to the terms of that classification rather than on the book's own terms, often to the detriment of the work. This happens in other areas of the arts as well: in visual art forced to declare itself as either “illustration” or “fine art,” for instance, when in truth it falls into the interstices between the two; in music labeled as “country,” “jazz,” or “roots,” when it actually utilizes elements from all those genres; etc.

Though labels make for convenient marketing tools, they misrepresent the work of artists who don't fall neatly into one category or another. Rigid categorization by critics and educators is an unsatisfactory method for understanding the border-crossing works to be found in all areas of the arts today. As interstitial artists from a variety of disciplines, we are increasing our visibility, claiming a place in a wider artistic and academic community. The mission of the Interstitial Arts Foundation is to give all border-crossing artists and art scholars a forum and a focus for their efforts. Rather than creating a new genre with new borders, we support the free movement of artists across the borders of their choice. We support an ongoing conversation among artists, academics, critics, and the general public in which art can be spoken of as a continuum rather than as a series of hermetically sealed genres. We support the development of a new vocabulary with which to view and critique border-crossing works. And we celebrate the large community of interstitial artists working in North America and around the world.