Bending Genre

Come for talk of the essay in all its formal wildness. Stay for a consideration of the form’s power and politics of resistance. Even deeper and more expansive than its first edition, Bending Genre 2.0 is essential reading for serious students, teachers, and writers of nonfiction. * Julija Šukys, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Missouri, USA, and author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017) *
As creative nonfiction continues to break new ground, Bending Genre gives writers and readers a marvelous map to new literary terrain, as charted by some of the form’s most interesting cartographers and practitioners. By turns earnest, argumentative, lyric, playful, and provocative, the authors of these pieces explore nonfiction forms as refuge, as rebellion, as intellectual practice, as erotics and aesthetics, as mode of making, and as liberating community. Encouraging exploration and seeded with compelling readings of familiar and less familiar texts, Bending Genre is suggestive rather than scholarly, offering a mode of making and a gloss on the meanings made by this rich, shifting, wonderfully hard to define literary playground that we call creative nonfiction. * E. J. Levy, Associate Professor, Colorado State University, USA *
Bending Genre is published into a landscape that has changed so much in the past ten years and will change even more in the next decades, and the essays that are the most convincing are those advocating that we cross, bend and break genre open in more disruptive ways – as writers and readers – and use our creative-critical powers to undo systems that have not been serving us. This book provides a solid anchor for thinking into genre-bending writing, and if readers supplement this text with the reading of many and diverse contemporary hybrid texts, they will experience first-hand how hot genre-bending writing can make their brains, how spacious it can make a heart. * Elizabeth Reeder, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, UK, and author of microbursts (2021) *
Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about ‘truthtelling’ to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a who’s-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers ‘push the line,’ the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre? Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail. * Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US [about the 1st edition] *
What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortable—too comfortable—with lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, mis-shelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities – creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. It’s time to shake things up. * Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre [about the 1st edition] *
Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft...The essays of Part II, 'Structures', offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay...an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements,montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor...I would recommend this collection to all serious writers. * Heidi Czerwiec, Rain Taxi [about the 1st edition] *
A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader's assumptions and expectations of the text--and they do so successfully...Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text. What is particularly noteworthy of Singer and Walker is that their project--much in vein of "queer" and of the notion that writing, like critical thinking, is interminable--remains alive online. They have harnessed the powers of new media to keep the discussion going, both on Facebook as well as the project's website. * Marcie Bianco, LambdaLiterary.org [about the 1st edition] *