CRAFTING THE “OTHER”: ON HYBRID & BEYOND-GENRE

First published at JMWW Journal:

This is a craft essay that is much about work that refuses craft essays. Yet, there’s much to say. It’s popular today to call “other” work a “third thing.” And whenever there’s a third thing, a fourth thing emerges to say the third thing is an old thing or no thing at all. Hovering off to the side is me, skeptical, fretting, fuming, stealing the agreeable bits and gluing them together like a real original, sounding like a nut again. I accept.

Gutting a pumpkin, for example, is a messy forearm-deep job. The intent is usually a jack-o’-lantern or pie filling, but I’m in it for the entrails. I don’t carve for Halloween, nor do I have much palate for pumpkin pie, but seeds I do well. Stripped and rinsed, seasoned and baked crisp. I like to serve them warm when my husband gets home from work. He likes the seeds plenty, but there’s practically a delirium in the way he takes to the emptied bowl. Pokes his index finger into the spice sloughings and savors the powder like the wand in a packet of Fun Dip. How necessary, I wonder, was the rigorous seed salvaging step? Or, did the seeds impart crucial flavor into the spice mix? Or, is it a third thing?

My recipe imprecise. Toss seeds in the liquid ingredients, sprinkle them with dry mix, and bake on low-ish heat. For liquids, I use a pat of melted butter, a piddle of worcestershire sauce, a gurgle of soy sauce, a bloop of maple syrup, and a drool of sesame oil. The dry mix contains seasoning salt, garlic powder, onion powder, something I forgot, and a final lift-off of lightly spicy togarashi chili powder.

If that vaguery is scary, there’s always a recipe. Too many, in fact. The sheer volume of recipes out there is absolutely stifling. Is it best to pick one and stay true? Or pick three, combine their most sensical attributes, and come out with a grandiose fourth thing that is now purely patentable? And couldn’t one also proprietarily name the process of combining three recipes, to the extent that said newly named entity is the one-and-only best practice for arriving at a fourth recipe and to combine two recipes is too few and to combine four recipes is too many? And if a five-combiner came along… no, no, no, we cannot dare imagine it. The pumpkin seed tent at the state fair would surely get struck by lightning.

It’s rare that I come across a lit journal’s submission call that defines what they’re looking for from hybrid works. How many elements, what kind, what hybrid is or could be. One wonders what it is people are doing over there in that mystery category. Journals may say, “If you don’t know what to call your work then that’s what we’re looking for.” Which implies—does it not?—that hybridity is anything and everything other than something it’s not? And what it’s not is the “pure” genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Say nothing of the potential for other sensory elements like illustration, diagram, list-making, photography, collage, digital media, audio, etc.

If we want to get serious about creating “hybrid” forms—preparing to host a workshop or write an essay, let’s say—and we look for a definition, I’m not sure we’d get much guidance. Whether noun or adjective, we basically get “of mixed character, composed of different elements” (Oxford).

Isn’t a pop song, then, a hybrid? It has two elements: lyric writing and music composition. If it’s accompanied by a music video, that’s a third simultaneous element. But a song is a song, no? We wouldn’t say we don’t know what to call it because it contains so many creative elements. A song is comprised of multiple elements, each in its own right a creative genre. In juxtaposition to all this literary hybrid/beyond-genre confusion, it almost seems unfair that a song gets to be called a song. Although, since I rarely see lit journals open for song submissions, I’d direct songwriters to the hybrid or beyond-genre categories.

In craft workshops, we are likely taught about the intentionality of hybridity and shown exemplars. I wonder if this is risky business. To witness is to desire, emulate, practice, grow, and hopefully diverge into our uniquely stamped expression. But does it also tamper with organic impulse?

Besides, how do teachers know what to teach when hybridity is presented as both a specific genre and an anything-goes category? If students study six examples, won’t those have been curated by the teacher’s predetermined sense of what hybridity looks like when functioning at its best? Will those examples set an expectation among students that they are genre-defining and what might be aimed for to achieve publication?

I ask because, as an editor of hybrid and beyond-genre submissions, I receive constant surprises and I’m the last person to suggest what hybrid/beyond-genre is or how to do it. It’s not a cop out (though I’ve heard the argument) to say I don’t know what I want until I see it. And true that submissions continuously inform and morph the category I read for. Though, I’m cognizant that I arrive to my role with aesthetic preferences and biases.

That certainly makes it challenging to write up a call for submissions without tipping the hat in a certain direction. Without creators perceiving that a journal prefers a certain beyond-genre or hybrid aesthetic. I am greedy, I want to indulge in all curiosities. Perhaps most of all, I want to see work from creators who feelaligned with hybrid/beyond-genre expression. What does that mean to them and what must they be doing?

I’ve offered no such samples here of work published in hybrid or beyond-genre categories. There is nothing wrong with inspiration or imitation, but I’m excited by the prospect of viewing work that arose from organic source to page. Here I want to experiment with the refusal of citing samples, as is virtually always done in craft essays. Encouraging readers and writers to not look toward someone else, but to look within. To gather up what’s found there. Mix it with the medium, get it on the page, and then, perhaps, collage it with layers of witness, inspiration, admiration, and technique.

I like the simplicity of the hybrid/beyond-genre category as a placeholder for all the possibilities that extend beyond a singular sense of genre. Being a safe and welcoming harbor. Yes, sometimes for the strategic and intentional combining of two or more elements. But also for the experimental and accidental, absurd and surreal, outrageous and nonsensical.

What I don’t want (as much as I might enjoy the pieces) are submissions that are clearly poetry or clearly short story and don’t incorporate, experiment, or veer. Work that perhaps was submitted as hybrid/beyond-genre simply because the other genre categories were not open for submissions. In such cases, I don’t typically see a cover letter making an argument to the contrary.

I do recall a submission that arrived with such a letter. It explained that the piece had previously been submitted as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—in all cases rejected. I could understand why the piece would have been submitted to all categories. It danced with all three elements. But it went beyond—created a fourth thing—and I adored it. It started almost too precious and protected, sentimental, but then it suddenly calved into loneliness and ended with an echo. I must have read that piece four or five times in a row to catch the author making that turn. They were in control from word-one and my assumptions were crushed like a pop can fumbling down a freeway.

Here’s a piece I also love, is also a surprise, and I’m so grateful it found a home where it did. Karen Kao’s “Taiwan 1969” was published in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. There in the journal’s title: “Nonfiction.” Their mission couldn’t be clearer. Yet look at this fabulous first paragraph:

“My mother is an octopus. She collects our comic books, straightens

collars, and slings bags across her narrow chest. She prods my

brothers and me down the airplane aisle with her hard beak.”

It’s a nonfiction journal, therefore Kao’s mother is literally an octopus. That’s the rule, right? Or, did Brevity let one slip through the cracks? Or, is Kao taking liberties with metaphor to strengthen her nonfiction case and she’ll surely clarify as much by the end? What’s more, if Kao insists on blending fiction into nonfiction, that is enacting two simultaneous elements. That’s hybrid by definition, right? So Brevity must therefore accept hybrids.

Or, is there a fifth thing? We must practice seeing in ourselves how we fall prey to reading with an eye conditioned by Western canonical, colonial, literary structures & academics. I may be presumptive of Kao’s intent, but I hope I can use the piece to make a broader point about genre judgments. Her mother is an octopus because she has many arms and three hearts. If we’re curious to understand how that can be so, we might read up on cultural bias from a source like Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World. It’s information that sits in front of any reading or writing we embark upon. And it makes one wonder just how much incredible work is being rejected for genre judgments alone.

What if we trust the writer? In Kao’s piece, that it is a nonfiction that the mother is an octopus for all the reasons cited. Full stop. Who are we to argue and dissect the literary mechanics so that the work makes sense to our cultural comforts? Can we concede that that function is not for us to perform? Least of all in our editorial decision-making process. Have we seen all there is to be seen on this planet? Do we know how the Kao family relates to one another? Do we know how all cultures express their truth in writing? Who are we to enforce, enact, assess, standardize? In the publishing business, that’s been our problem to contend with for ages. We do a dismal job at it. Bravo to Brevity.

When not handled with care, genre tags become ignorant of non-dominant, non-Western cultures. Become puritanical, commodified, tunnel-visioned, and judgmental. Genre tags are failures when they invite publications to impose fact vs. fiction upon work that wasn’t asking for advice or correction. A role as a reader or editor at a publication is a weighty one. We hold people’s creative genius, livelihood, vulnerability, and truth. Diverse staffing is critical. Understanding how to read with a trained eye, beginner’s mind, and open arms is critical.

Hybrid as a category fails when it turns away creators who appear not to have combined two or more identifiable elements per the genre’s supposed definition. My hope is for less defining of its own category, less policing of content elements, and more deep listening. Constantly challenging the internalized place from which one is reacting to the work. I hope for hybrid, if it’s to be treated as a distinct genre, to function more like that one street that’s blocked off to automobiles—people walking excitedly in zig zags, drunk on freedom because they never get to spill outside the crosswalks. Writer: go there.

Then go here to submit Blended & Beyond work at JMWW

P.S. When pumpkin seed season is over, look for the continuation of this essay in which I discuss misconceptions about hybrid and blended-genre work, its function as a safe space, and ways in which one can foster a “blended & beyond” mindset.