Dig Into Genre

Pick a genre, any genre.

I sat alone, reluctant to decide which genre to put on my Antioch application. For a few years, I had been studying and writing poetry. I’d also taken one creative nonfiction class just before applying to Antioch. Before that, I had only written fiction (short stories), but that was back in college, when Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie ruled. I graduated in 1980, before most of my fellow Antioch students were born. During my work life at SFMOMA, spanning over two decades, I wrote press releases, ad campaigns, and articles about art and artists. Marketing. Communications. Buzz words. Calls to action. Departments working together. At home, sitting at my desk to do my own writing, I had no museum curator or editor to support me.

What I really wanted to be writing were stories and poems about my own lived experience: family disintegration, the constancy of parenthood and caregiving, getting outside of my bubble, depression and anxiety, and drug experimentation and addiction. When I commuted by bus or ferry, I wrote down ideas, observations, and poems in the tiny notebooks I kept in my purse. I scribbled my to-do lists, grocery lists, and takeout orders there, too. I got around to those, but not to the writing.

I realized if I were going to take my writing seriously, I had better do it now. Most of all, I knew how much I had to learn. I needed a commitment and due dates. So, when I dug into the Antioch MFA program, I chose creative nonfiction. It sounded the most cogent to me.

Antioch uses flower names for its student cohorts. I joined the Goldenrod cohort in June 2022, but because of my mother’s death on June 7 and a bout of bacterial pneumonia that landed me in the hospital on the program’s start date, I began in December as a Hydrangea instead. My primary goal was to write a memoir about my family of all girls, and soon thought it was mostly about my mother. It’s hard to write about someone when you’re in the depths of grief, and I nearly dropped out of the program. Then my mentor suggested I write fiction instead, and since I enjoy working with middle school students (I had been teaching sixth through eighth grades by then), why not write for young people? In a last-ditch effort, I changed genres, and since I was too late to genre jump, I ended up double-majoring in Writing for Young People and Creative Nonfiction—the two genres that were completely new to me. And the cost of getting stuck in the genre muck? An extra semester and changing cohorts again—to become an Iris. If nothing more, I became a budding writer, still searching for my medium.

Starting fresh in fiction, I attended a seminar on retellings where the speaker prompted us to identify stories in need of an update. Having grown up performing various parts in The Nutcracker, and now seeing it as a racist story, I tried to modernize it. My story centered on a wealthy white family living in San Francisco during the early 2000s. Yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about Marin City, a Black community undergoing school desegregation. I decided this is the story I wanted to tell, that deserves to be told. School desegregation was happening for the first time in the U.S. in fifty years at the middle school where I worked—and had happened in my own K-8 school in Ohio in 1967, when I was in the third grade. I wanted young readers from diverse and homogeneous communities to read this story to better understand the past and their own futures in terms of separation by race and income.

I needed to write a middle grade novel because history was being made at the elementary and middle schools, and I didn’t want to write for the younger grades. My difficulty writing for middle grades stems not only from my novice status, but from the constraints of the genre itself. I have been told by mentors to just write the novel and not worry about what (genre) it is. This is generous and generative advice. But when I do that, I receive gentle reminders in workshops that what I am writing may not be a middle grade novel. Caught between just writing it and writing by the rules, I feel stymied by the latter and wonder why I can’t swear or write about sex for the many kids who already engage in these behaviors. And if they don’t, they certainly know kids who do. Even more important, I am writing characters outside my race, which requires a great deal of empathy and consideration. Maybe what I want to write most is a banned book. They were always my favorites.

Focusing more on the book’s characters and readers, and less on the genre—more for publishers, bookstores, and MFA programs—has helped me make some progress. I finally felt better about my writing after I learned about genre fluidity.

Genre fluidity combines genres such as fiction and poetry, or historical and speculative fiction. Throw in some fantasy, grab me by the horror, woo me with a rom-com, convince me with a mystery. (Marketing speak—my invasive species.) A graphic novel can be any of these, with the addition of sequential art work. You get the picture. The possibilities are seemingly endless, yet somehow still bound by the past—what came before.

In my present state as a perennial wildflower, I’m seeking new ways to tell my truth by using innovative forms. As for my creative nonfiction project, I have never stopped gestating the memoir. Approaching it from a genre-fluid perspective, instead of a traditional structure, it could become nested stories with chapters from my sisters’ points of view. The truth of our mom lies buried deep inside of her, and some version of it lives on in us. Or, I could find her truth in my garage—where her poems rest in binders—and use her own words along with mine. My Nutcracker retelling may become a romantic fantasy filled with gritty reality (or is that horror?). And my desegregation story might morph into a book of essays or a novel co-written by me and my former students.

So, pick a genre. Any genre. Every genre. Germinate genre. Fertilize genre. Cross pollinate genre. Lean on your ear, your eye, your gut, your heart, and your mind. Learn the fundamentals and read experimental. I haven’t even begun to write like myself. But I’m ready to push through genres until I do.