Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That

“I’ve often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.”


Found this in the Reader’s Guide in the back of Karen Joy Fowler’s story collection Black Glass. Can’t remember the last time I read something that made the writer in me want to pump my fist in the air.

I wish I was good enough to be accused of that!

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve been labeling myself a “contemporary fantasy” writer to my local peers, mostly because I’m a little too lazy to explain to someone what “slipstream” or “fabulism” means–hell, I’ve read the essays in Conjunctions 39 and Feeling Very Strange and I’m still not 100% sure what they mean. But I know enough to know these terms are just the closest-size round holes that I can cram my square peg into.***

My stories aren’t Tolkien or Howard, or Heinlein or Clarke. (Not dissing–I’d love to have their careers.) But in following the example of writers who “write the kind of stuff I like to read,” it’s no surprise I find a connection with Fowler’s statement.

***(Inner Editor: “Gee, Freudian slip much?”)
(-Me: “What’s this site called again?”)