Melding Genres

Ezra Pound’s clarion call to “make it new” has inspired many writers to reject tradition and invent forms and styles that best embody the originality and uniqueness of their message and their voice. Breaking with custom and convention can sometimes be the only way to best explore the issues in contemporary culture that both trouble and inspire artists—identity, creativity, sexuality, race, art—and the creation of a new form through which to examine these issues can be a cause for celebration.

Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, edited by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov, simultaneously recognizes, merges, and ignores the boundaries that have traditionally divided the literary genres. In the same way that its title suggests a shared likeness among people who are related to one another, the hybrid works in this anthology feature elements from the genres that label them in their presentation of wholly individual literary forms.

In “Local, Organic and Living: A Preface,” editor Sulak defines hybrid literature as “individual works that do not replicate any previously existing pattern of literary affiliation. Rather, they take features from multiple parents—multiple genres—and mix them to create a new entity.” Illuminating examples of this definition include Diane Wakoski’s “Poems Embedded in Letters: On the Archaeology of Movies and Books,” Miriam Libicki’s “Erasing the Distance: Graphic Journalism and Empathy,” and Gregory Orr’s “Writable Radiance: Notes on the Hybrid of Lyric and Prose.” In these pieces, and so many others in this collection, there is a meshing, a fusion, a blending, and a blurring of modes and conventions that produce cutting-edge forms and structures for the contemporary literary voice.

The anthology is organized to maximize its potential for a variety of readers. Sulak and Kolosov, who are poets, essayists, and educators themselves, have collected pieces from established, as well as emerging, writers and artists and present them within eight hybrid literary genres: Lyric Essay, Epistolary, Poetic Memoir, Prose Poetry, Performative, Short-Form Fiction, Flash Fiction, and Pictures Made of Words. An introduction to each hybrid genre appears at the beginning of each chapter, offering historical and cultural contexts, as well as defining characteristics, relationships to convention and tradition, and highlights of the ways each new genre has come to define itself. Next, every author offers an essay on process and craft before his individual hybrid work appears.

For example, in her essay on craft, “A Net You Can Breathe Through: Digressing into Form” in the Short-Form Nonfiction section, Patricia Vigderman explains how, for her, “form is the challenge, not genre” and cautions readers:

Don’t call it fiction or nonfiction or poetry—don’t even call it creative. The business and pleasure of writing is finding a form that can contain more than one register at a time: humor with loss, or admiration with exasperation, or awe with ordinariness—or all those at once.

One is reminded of Whitman and Dickinson, and of the experiments and innovations in the Modern period, yet the works collected here seem in many ways unlike anything we have seen before. Vigderman’s own piece, from “Possibility: Essays Against Despair,” is part stream of consciousness, part list, part alliterative free verse, part history lesson, part travelogue:

Marfa is a funny sounding name. Like a child’s lisp, or a foreigner who can’t get that troublesome Engish “th” sound. Or like a brand name cobbled together out of two people’s names—Marfa Delivery, maybe, or Marfa Soap, recalling Marv and Fanny, or Martinez and Farrell. As it happens, this little whistle stop, founded to accommodate the railroad in 1881, was named by a Russian, a woman, a frontier wife brought to the wide views of the Chihuahuan Desert and the long view of the iron rails cutting through it because her husband was a railroad overseer.

Reading even just this short excerpt, we can see...