Vampires, Zombies, Bodices, and Perps:
Genre in Creative Writing
by Abby Bardi
The essays in this collection were originally presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association convention in Boston in March of 2020 on the cusp of the global COVID-19 pandemic. My reason for proposing the panel was simple: I had spent decades in my creative writing classes wrestling with the central questions it posed, and I wanted answers:
How do challenges to the traditional boundaries of genre impact the teaching of creative writing? How might fiction, drama, and even poetry address these challenges? How can the conventions and tropes of genre fiction be used fruitfully in literary writing? What role does genre fiction play in the creative writing classroom?
While my underlying motives were partly selfish, the topic seemed especially timely because, as these papers will all make clear, what we do in our classes has significant implications beyond the classroom. While our NeMLA panel may have had an inkling about the looming threat of COVID-19, we could not have predicted the varied and profound expressions of the social justice movement that would flower that summer as a result of the murder of George Floyd. These papers looked forward to some of the central questions that movement has posed: whose lives matter, and who controls the narratives of those lives? As Mathew Salesses points out in his important 2021 book Craft in the Real World, the pedagogical decisions we make in creative writing classes have real-world reverberations, and discussions of craft “are never neutral” (xv). The way we approach the question of genre fiction in the creative writing classroom is not just a question of pure craft but of whose cultural values and expectations we accept as the norm, and which values we seek to purvey.
Many students come to our classes with an affinity for genre fiction. If we devalue it at the institutional level, aren’t we effectively telling them that their tastes and opinions are less valid than ours? As Audrey Heffers asks in “Rethinking Genre Boundaries: An Inclusive Pedagogy,” “What does it tell our students if, when they walk into our classroom, we outlaw witches, ghosts, and dystopias? What kind of classroom environment does this set the foundation for?” Heffers makes the important point that, in an “open and collaborative learning environment,” we have as much to learn from students as they do from us. She argues that being “inclusive in the kinds of texts assigned,” e.g., assigning genre fiction, “strengthens our pedagogy and makes the classroom environment—and perhaps the academy as a whole—feel more hospitable to students.” But, she wonders, “[c]an genre fiction ask the ‘big questions’ (questions about philosophy, morality, and the human condition) to the same degree that literary fiction can? If so, certainly this becomes a significant factor in the argument for the inclusion of genre fiction in the classroom.” Heffers concludes that the answer to this question is yes: that genre fiction addresses “serious issues” has been demonstrated repeatedly in canonical works such as 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, in the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez, and in the “genre fiction” of writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Carmen Maria Machado. In including diverse writers and approaches in the curriculum, Heffers argues, we “challenge elitism and exclusivity.”
In “Disenchanting the Literary: Genre and Craft in the Creative Writing Workshop,” Patrick Thomas Henry traces his own disillusionment with the “bleakest realism” demanded by writing workshops and notes that “[i]n public library reading events, English classes, and AP lit courses, well-intentioned teachers and librarians insisted that realism meant literary, which in turn meant quality. Genre fiction wasn’t ‘real,’ therefore it wasn’t ‘literary.’” He notes that “when readers become writers, those internalized dismissals of genre fiction can poison their writing—especially in a workshop.” Henry agrees with Heffers, that students come to creative writing classes with genre fiction not only as a frame of reference but as a source of sustenance and enchantment: “I’d hazard that few aspiring writers set out to peddle exclusively literary fiction: for many of us, genre fiction—that expansive parasol—sheltered us from the blazing sun of childhood and teen stressors. We also recognized our own struggles in those narratives.” He tells the story of one of his professors in an undergraduate writing class who outlawed genre fiction entirely, offering these requirements: “‘You’ve got to learn to tell real stories first,’ he [the professor] said. ‘So no magical quests. No prophecies. No enchanted swords. And no fucking dwarves.’” Henry, too, invokes Salesses and cautions that an uncritical approach to pedagogy serves only to enshrine the preferences of the instructor as guidelines. Instead, he suggests, we should agree to only one rule for students: “tell us the story that you want to tell, and tell it as only you can.”
In “Crime Fiction in the Creative Writing Classroom,” Michelle Pretorius makes the case that one of the most popular genres, crime fiction, is “an important tool in the creative writing classroom and an integral part of the training of the writers of the future” and a “vehicle for change.” Challenging the stereotype of crime fiction as “formulaic,” she offers examples of “literary” fiction with crime elements, from Dostoyevsky to Coetzee. Rather than simply defending crime fiction from the traditional charges against it, she demonstrates how its close attention to craft is invaluable to creative writing pedagogy: “Crime Fiction places particular emphasis on the craft elements of fiction such as character revelation and dialogue, setting and tone, and, of course, structure and plot, since each of these elements become crucial clues as to the solving of the crime or mystery.” Her paper traces her experience teaching an undergraduate course, “The Craft of (Crime) Fiction,” and how, in exploring genre fiction, she was able to focus on craft elements that are the mainstay of creative writing classes in the context of fiction that students enjoyed and could connect to. In studying the genre, students “learn that crime fiction is not only critically positioned in relation to established genre conventions, but that it is situated in time and place and is therefore a vehicle for social commentary.”
Each of these three papers challenges the view common to the creative-writing academy that genre fiction is not “literary” and is an inferior art form. At the same time, as all three papers point out, elements of genre fiction exist in a multitude of “literary” canonical texts.
And now, a confession: for many years I was one of those people who outlawed genre in their creative writing classes. It was not because I had anything against genre fiction—on the contrary, I wrote my M.A. thesis on Dashiell Hammett. My restrictions, which seemed to blossom organically in my syllabus until they constituted quite an efflorescence, existed because I found that whatever I might think of them in theory, in practice, they tended to produce better writing. It seemed to me that if students had clear guidelines as to what to do or not do in a short story or a poem, their results hewed more closely to the traditional modernist forms that have been the mainstay of MFA fiction.
At some point, I began to feel that preventing students from writing genre fiction was doing us all some kind of favor. There was always a student who, if left to his (they were generally male) own devices, would crank out endless sci-fi narratives with flat characters and illogical plots, and to be honest, I got tired of reading them. There was one in particular that finally broke me, a long saga taking place on a planet called Zork. When I suggested to a student that his main character could be more fully developed and that his actions didn’t strike me as clearly enough motivated, the student snapped back, “Well that’s how they do things on Zork.” It was probably the following semester that I instituted the requirement that all settings had to be places the author had at least visited and set during a time period with which he or she was familiar. In short, there were to be no more Zorks, and no stories set on the East Side of Chicago (pro tip: there isn’t one).
But at some point a few years ago, I realized I needed to get over my fustiness and step into the twenty-first century, in which literary fiction consistently borrows liberally from sci-fi, crime fiction, fantasy, romance, and all of the above at once. Just as the wall between literary and popular fiction, built in the twentieth century and maintained by the academic-industrial complex, has gradually been torn down, distinctions between genres and what is “literary” have been revealed to be artificial and meaningless—as any passing acquaintance with Jane Austen and Mary Shelley has made clear for 200 years. It’s worth noting that in the 2021 Booker Prize longlist, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is a science-fiction novel about an “artificial friend.” Mary Lawson’s novel A Town Called Solace examines the intersections of several crimes. In the Booker translation shortlist, Megan McDowell’s translation of Mariana Enriquez’s story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed includes “crooked witches” and “homeless ghosts.” Another shortlisted translated work, Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is described by the Guardian as a “dystopian nonfiction novel”—clearly a genre-buster.
The essays in this collection affirm the erosion of these traditional and artificial boundaries and celebrate the role genre fiction can play in the classroom. Even more significantly, they offer pedagogies liberated from the tyranny and traumas of creative-writing-workshop culture that point the way to helping students find their own voices and narratives, their own vampires, zombies, bodices, and perps.
Abby bardi
Abby Bardi is the author of the novels The Book of Fred (also published in France as Le Livre de Fred), The Secret Letters, and Double Take. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including Quarterly West and The Bellingham Review, where her story "Abu the Water Carrier" was the winner of the Bellingham Review's 2016 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Her stories have also appeared in fiction anthologies such as High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories about Adultery, New Stories from the Midwest 2018, and The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell. She is a Collegiate Professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus and the NeMLA Board Area Chair for Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, the oldest train depot in the United States.