Re-thinking Genre Boundaries:
An Inclusive Pedagogy

by Audrey T. Heffers

Many of our students come to the creative writing classroom with books that they already love, books that have shaped their literary sensibilities and that may have even shaped their sense of who they are; this is, after all, the power of literature. Some of these books may be literary—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah—but others might be what is dubbed “genre fiction.” (Stephen King’s catalogue, for instance, is often popular with my students when they enter my courses.) 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?

The soundest argument for literary-only creative writing classrooms is that students should learn the basics of realism before they worry about all the “extra frills” of genre fiction. But what if we have students who know that they want to write fantasy or sci-fi or Westerns, and the outlawing of their preferred genre disinclines them to learn the value of literary writing? Students can learn from the strengths of both “literary” and “genre” fiction, as well as the potential pitfalls of both, to craft better fiction no matter the genre they write in. And, as happens in the best instructor/student interactions, we can learn from them as they learn from us, not in a strictly hierarchical structure, but rather in a more open and collaborative learning environment.

The superiority of “literary” fiction is founded on the false assumption that “literary” means “quality” and “genre” means “artless.” This premise of an inherent link between “literary” and “quality” makes the exclusion of genre from the creative writing classroom a move towards elitism. John Gardner writes in his esteemed craft text The Art of Fiction that he is not speaking to writers of “junk fiction,” listing out examples of “thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi,” which in his view “requires an authentic junk mind” (x). His craft advice, Gardner writes, is instead “for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists” (x). While Gardner’s book was originally published in 1983, the mentality it perpetuates is far from extinct; for example, in the 2012 article “It’s Genre. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!” Arthur Krystal writes that genre novels “stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes,” and, further, that “good commercial fiction is inferior to good literary fiction in the same way that Santa Claus is inferior to Wotan” (226). This sort of ideology surrounding what writing has value, what writing is worthy of addressing in craft texts, and what writing is worthy of the creative writing classroom only perpetuates the mythos that the academy, writing programs, and the literary world are exclusive, elitist spaces—spaces reserved for the “serious literary artists” who only write a particular style of realism and adhere to a particular aesthetic and just so happen to overwhelmingly be of privileged identities.

Gardner’s insistence on “serious literary artists” is born of a false dichotomy: literary realism does not automatically signify artistic value, just as genre does not automatically signify a lack of artistic value. Novelist Benjamin Percy centers his craft text, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, on this very idea, juggling the benefits of each of these categories while acknowledging the limitations that they can have as well. Percy writes that “Literary fiction highlights exquisite sentences, glowing metaphors, subterranean themes, fully realized characters. And genre fiction excels at raising the most important question: What happens next?” (17).1 There is something to be gained, then, by all students—those who write literary, those who write genre, and those who write both—when they are able to learn both of these modes. It is possible to isolate the craft elements in the best examples of each mode and use those examples as models for fiction writ large. This broadens the bank of texts from which we can pull, in addition to helping our courses generate more connections for more students. In being inclusive in the kinds of texts assigned, this approach strengthens our pedagogy and makes the classroom environment—and perhaps the academy as a whole—feel more hospitable to students who come to us with various interests, backgrounds, and experiences.

The argument considering the artistic value of genre fiction, and its inclusion in the classroom, is two-fold. On the one hand, there are the more technical aspects of fiction that Percy’s quote points to—plot, character, language, and metaphor. In “It’s Genre. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!” Krystal writes that “one of the things we don’t expect [of genre fiction] is excellence in writing,” going so far as to say that to praise the opening of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express as “an example of ‘masterly’ writing” is evidence that “you and I are not splashing in the same shoals of language” (225). The attitude that someone’s assessment of writing is inherently inferior to your own is perhaps obviously problematic. This sort of Platonic ideal of language is insidiously rooted in factors that are not entirely tied to the linguistic expression itself. In his craft text “‘Pure Craft’ is a Lie,” Matthew Salesses questions the ways in which culture and craft are linked, even if the cultural context for something as broad as “excellence in writing” (Krystal 225) is never clarified. In fact, the contexts for such aesthetic judgments—and, as Salesses argues, they do have contexts—is presented as normative, and as such the influence of dominant culture on the judgment itself is never acknowledged. In Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing, creative writing pedagogy theorist Janelle Adsit writes that

While the workshop is often thought of as a form of student-centered pedagogy, it turns out that workshop conversations serve to marginalize a range of aesthetic orientations and the cultural histories to which they belong. The regulation of taste is one way that creative writing polices its borders, allowing the subject-position of the literary writer to remain an exclusive position that only a select few can access. (67)

In what ways is an approach such as Krystal’s furthering “conversations [that] serve to marginalize a range of aesthetic orientations”? What is the aim of such a “regulation of taste”? Why make the position of writer “exclusive” by means of stringent borders, taxonomies that seem at once rigid and arbitrary?

This line of questioning highlights the oversimplified idea that “literary” and “genre” writing are even capable of being clearly and cleanly separated, which suggests a lack of familiarity with the ways which many writers engage with genre elements, especially in contemporary fiction texts. The exclusion of genre becomes problematized by this blurring of the lines between literary and genre, something which puts into action Percy’s argument for learning from both modes of writing. There have long been exceptions that are considered “acceptable” pieces of genre fiction—George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Rady Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And what of a genre such as magical realism, introduced into the classroom through stories such as Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”? Genre already bleeds into the classroom, sometimes under the pretense that a writer like García Márquez is simply so exceptional that he doesn’t need to adhere to the same literary rules for inclusion. How useful is it, then, to draw hard lines about genre fiction and its lack of value? How does a contemporary writer like Carmen Maria Machado, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna, fit into this paradigm when the quality of her fiction has won her awards and accolades, all while she writes in horror and fabulist modes? In “Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate,” Lincoln Michel argues that “Realism is not a binary. It is at a minimum a spectrum” (par. 7); Michel charts this spectrum along a “mimetic/fantastic” world axis and a “naturalistic/expressionist” mode axis, with quadrants that are “realist,” “speculative,” “stylized,” and “fabulist.” The question “Should we include genre in the classroom?” would best be replaced with questions of the kinds of genre fiction we could include, as well as questions of where the best quality writing is being produced and how we can use that to help our students grow as writers.

Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is a collection which mixes stories of different genres while using uncommon narrative techniques, both of which give the reader (and the student writer) much to dig into and learn from. The story collection offers magical realism (“Who Will Greet You at Home” and “Second Chances”), science fiction (“What It Means When a Man Fall from the Sky”), and fable (“What is a Volcano?”) side-by-side with literary realism. There are multiple reasons why this collection has as much right to be in the classroom as canonical works of fiction and contemporary iterations of the canon’s aesthetic. The speculative stories in the collection do not shy away from emotional depth with themes such as the way that a mother’s death can haunt a family, or the consequences of helping others when their grief begins to eat at you from the inside. In terms of style, this collection provides examples of all kinds of genres, including literary, which gives students a variety of fiction from which they can learn. In terms of voice, the literary stories Arimah presents here often have some fresh narrative twist, such as a playfulness with the narrative frame and the passage of time in “The Future Looks Good,” or the second-person point of view that enhances the heartbreak of an emotionally abused daughter in “Windfalls.” Additionally, the collection addresses cultural touchstones that many students may not be aware of, such as the Biafran War, and so it also serves to be inclusive of narratives that are not strictly white and American/European. If an instructor discounts this collection due to the speculative stories, then students miss a learning opportunity that may be very valuable to their growth as writers. This, of course, simply serves as one example. However, it does highlight the kinds of work that we may lose in the classroom with strict dictums of “no genre.”

In addition to the technical lessons that genre fiction can offer, there is a more over-arching issue when the question of genre fiction is posed: can genre fiction say important things? This gets at the thematic aspect that Percy indicates. Put another way: can 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. (As alluded to when discussing her themes, Arimah is able to weave such questions into her stories, whatever genre they may be.) Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case for speculative fiction in her craft text Wave in the Mind, writing that

Fantasies are often set in ordinary life, but the material of fantasy is a more permanent, universal reality than the social customs realism deals with. The substance of fantasy is psychic stuff, human constants: situations and imageries we recognize without having to learn or know anything at all about New York now, or London in 1850, or China three thousand years ago. (43)

In using the unrealistic elements of speculative fiction, the writer has the opportunity to reach more readers, and perhaps to ask different questions or approach questions differently. No one, after all, has lived in Earthsea, and so it can pose the “big questions” without concerns about whether or not the reader can relate to the world being portrayed. “Relatability” can too often default to attempts to appeal to readers who are of privileged identities, which upholds hegemonic structures in literature. In Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator panel “Decolonizing Craft: The Future of Creative Writing Instruction,” Matthew Salesses discussed how “Just the term ‘the reader’ is part of the institutionalized problem with workshops in that we say ‘the reader’ as though everybody has the same reader and as if we know who that reader is, which means we’re just imagining a really super normalized…heteronormative etc. reader, and then we’re applying that to all of the work in the class.” He argues that, instead, the aim should be to understand a particular writer’s “ideal reader” for a particular story. Removing the pressure of so-called relatability has the potential to crack open possibilities beyond the dominant culture.

Genre fiction that addresses “serious” issues can be found time and again. Le Guin’s own short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is as much a thought experiment as a story, one that examines the ethics of a society that builds its contentment on the abuse of children who are othered. It takes on a very particular meaning for students who have recently seen immigrant detention facilities in the news, students who have borne witness to images and audio clips of Latinx children in cages sleeping on foil blankets. The way that Le Guin leverages the universalizing methods of fantasy to create “a more permanent, universal reality” (43) allows students to plug real-world circumstances into the fable-like premise of Omelas, prompting the readers to make connections and articulate problems. Depending on the reader and their cultural touchpoints, who does the abused child become? Who benefits? What are the systems and structures that make this seem inevitable and impossible to fix? A simple story, then, about a utopia with a dark underbelly, becomes complicated by the readers’ knowledge of the real world. It allows the student readers to question the circumstances with which they are familiar. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in this way, has a shelf life that feels full of possibilities because of the core questions that it asks about humanity and society.

Le Guin is, of course, not a singular example here: Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” troubles the connections between religion, morality, and exploitation; Toni Morrison’s Beloved tackles the intergenerational trauma of slavery as literal haunting; Ted Chiang’s Exhalation presents questions about language, memory, and free will to complicate understandings of human experience; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy considers the ecological and social implications of climate change; Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone incorporates themes surrounding slavery, oppression, and the violence of the state; Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties uses horror and the fantastic to explore the links between gender, sexuality, and violence.

Machado’s stories are often ones that my students latch onto. In part, this may be because they come to my classroom with an inherent interest in horror/the fantastic. But students also find themselves invested in the verisimilitude of Machado’s stories. Her work serves as an excellent model of how fiction can get at a greater truth by moving away from what is considered traditional, objective literary realism. In “Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology,” fantasy novelist Lev Grossman writes, “When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality—but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply.... You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them” (par. 12). For example, Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” is based on the fairy tale of the green ribbon, and the narrator’s head falls off at the end because of the unraveling of said ribbon. Despite these unrealistic elements, students can see the touchstones to life. What kind of world lets a husband and a doctor add a vaginal stitch after birth for the husband’s pleasure? The titular husband stitch, after all, is real; what are the implications of that? What should a woman do when her husband sees any sense of keeping thoughts/feelings to herself as a slight against him? What does it mean when an otherwise loving husband is responsible for his wife’s death? The students have discussions dissecting theme, which allows them to ask questions about and consider real life. The fantastic allows the reader to look askance at the world we live in and deepen our understanding of what is happening around us.

The second story in Machado’s collection, “Inventory,” especially resonated with my advanced fiction workshop in the Spring 2020 semester. There is the obvious—the story takes place during a pandemic, which I never could have prepared to coincide with the early months of COVID-19. But after reading this story, centered around a bisexual woman and her anguishing loss of intimacy, there were more stories submitted with queer characters in that semester than in any other semester in which I have taught fiction. “Inventory” was not the only queer story in the course, but neither was the course by any means exclusively centered around queer fiction. In Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing, Adsit writes that “we expect students to internalize…our disciplinary taste indirectly through immersion” (49). Queer fiction like “Inventory” created a door where queerness seemed to become implicitly permissible in stories submitted for workshop; students discussed the queerness of each other’s narratives openly in the classroom as simply another aspect of the story. This is one example of how genre fiction might represent marginalized communities in ways that make an impact, and how genre fiction can make the course feel more inclusive if a student does want to write marginalized characters into their work. It feels vital to ask ourselves these questions as we assign readings: are we, as instructors, thoughtful about what students might interpret from our reading selections? What are we modelling for our students with the texts we select? What are we doing to make our students—and their work—feel welcome or unwelcome? How intentional are we about this?

It is dubious to frame writers like Machado or García Márquez as mere exceptions. That is to say, simply because a reader may consider them exceptional writers does not mean that they are exceptional in spite of the genres that they write in. Masterful in the craft as they are, these genre fiction writers are using the tools that speculative fiction makes available to them, addressing “permanent, universal reality” and “human constants” (Le Guin 43). Specifically, they use those speculative elements to make strange elements of the world that might otherwise go unexamined. This is a tool that student writers can analyze and attempt in their own writing if they are interested in exploring philosophical and moral questions about the human condition with a similar approach.

What students connect to artistically is going to vary, and it is that exact variety that instructors should be acknowledging and encouraging whenever possible. Instructors need to allow for diversity of thought, background, and approaches. Different readings will inspire different students; it is our responsibility to teach not to the handful of students who might share our aesthetic but to teach to the entire class to the best of our abilities. In her introduction to the 2019 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Machado explains that she tells her undergraduate students “that literature is about potential, about the brazen and thrilling integration of other people’s history with art with their history with art, about ambitious leaps of genre and world-building and the ordinary magic of the human experience and the minute perfection of the sentence and pursuing your own obsessions and dozens of other wonderful things besides” (xviii-xix).

When considering the creative writing classroom in terms of what readings we include and what we allow students to submit for workshop, we need to be careful that we are not using “literary” as an excuse to not evolve our teaching methods and readings. The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning provides examples of inclusive teaching strategy, such as “[i]ncorporating diverse perspectives into course content by expanding reading lists beyond white male authors…lecture examples [that] offer a variety of human examples, and avoiding tokenizing particular individuals, students, or representations” (par. 3). Our teaching can seem stagnant and out-of-touch if we use the label of “literary” to adhere to a canon that emphasizes authors of privileged identities, or if we only engage with those in their aesthetic vein. In Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Machado writes that she is “trying to show [students] that traditions are not destinies, that no community can own a writer or a book, that the existence of multiple distinct communities of literature means that there is more fiction to read, that the house is even bigger than you had imagined. And yet some folks are only interested in locking the doors, turning out the lights” (xix). There is room in the study of creative writing for a range of writers, anyone from James Baldwin and Danielle Evans to Carmen Maria Machado and Lesley Nneka Arimah.

The University of Michigan’s statement on inclusive teaching requires “[t]hat all of our students have full access to learning, and the tools they need to do so successfully and meaningfully” and “[t]hat all of our students feel welcomed, supported, and valued as they learn” (Gannon par. 13). Does outlawing genre in the classroom welcome or reject students? What are we doing, practically, as instructors in order to support and value student writers? Is a rejection of genre fiction out of some sense of duty to a Platonic ideal of artistic merit actually benefitting writers? Why wouldn’t we, as instructors, take advantage of everything that literature has to offer? In cutting off entire genres as low quality, we lose access to “tools” that can help our students learn “successfully and meaningfully” (Gannon 13). If the aim is to create an inclusive classroom community that is meant to foster student growth, then we need to be aware of the purpose of our policies and teaching philosophies. What steps are we taking to create an inclusive environment? Where can we make more space for inclusivity, not simply as a buzz word, but as a demonstrably applied praxis?

One of our greatest priorities as instructors is to foster individual student growth, even if that student does not share our exact aesthetic tastes. Inclusive pedagogy and diversity require us to be open to aesthetics different than our own and to work within different styles to foster improvement. In one Advanced Fiction workshop that I taught, a student had written a science fiction story where the house’s technology was alive; I was able to recommend Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains,” which I had taught in previous courses, as a potential model for the story. However, in that same semester, other students were writing science fiction pieces about intergalactic wars, a subgenre with which I am less familiar. I took this as an opportunity: I could offer them feedback as someone outside of that subgenre’s discourse community, while asking students familiar with the genre for their input. I made every effort not to discourage the students to shift their stories’ focuses simply for my own aesthetic ends.

In Matthew Salesses’ “‘Pure Craft’ is a Lie,” one of his examples uses the literary/genre dichotomy to make a greater point. While illustrating this greater point, the example also highlights the ways that exclusionary pedagogical practices that value only literary realism can hinder learning. Salesses writes, “It’s not teaching them to incorporate ‘literary’ strategies, it’s teaching them that their knowledge of the world isn’t useful in this discussion and needs to be discarded. The instructor is teaching to the rest of the class” (par. 13). So we need to ask ourselves as instructors: Whose knowledge is dismissed? Whose knowledge is valued? Why? What are the underlying biases of this and why are they perpetuated? In the panel “Decolonizing Craft: The Future of Creative Writing Instruction,” Matt Bell said that he “started out teaching creative writing probably by just reproducing what [he] had been taught.” Early in his career, he asked frustrated creative writing students how many of them thought that they were “writing…the right kind of stories for this program” (none did), as well as “how many people think that other people have read more books than you, or the right kind of books?” (all of the students did,), and who was “doing work that’s, like, secret, and you keep it for yourself, and you don’t bring it to workshop, or you don’t show it to your professors?” (which was, once again, all of the students). Bells’ conclusion pondered, “What are we doing that sets every single person at a program up to feel that way? That can’t be the outcome of our teaching,” and argued that we should instead be “looking at ways not to recreate that.” With this in mind, instructors shouldn’t simply reproduce old models and/or how we personally were taught. We should always remain open to questioning, challenging, and innovating.

Diversity needs to have a practical application in the classroom. To ask students to leave their inherent aesthetic interests at the door of our classrooms can be interpreted by students as a rejection of their potential contributions as writers, which can lead to student detachment. When students have more artistic freedom, when they are able to write original fables or modernized myths or fantasy Westerns, it can enliven their writing in ways that might not happen should they be limited to literary realism. This also engages students in each other’s work because a) the student reader may enjoy that particular genre, and b) the student writer is invested in it.

In Lev Grossman’s response to Arthur Krystal’s “Easy Writers,” Grossman writes that Krystal “relies on the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction as being one between works of art, on the one hand, and escapism on the other” (par. 7). However, genre fiction can go beyond a simple preference for the escapism of fantasy. It is not solely about defending the presence of magic or spaceships in a story; this approach is about fiction that works well as a piece of art and can ask big questions. Those big questions might be ones about marginalization, hegemonic structures, and issues of identity and representation.2 Inclusive genre fiction might appeal to students who connect to stories about marginalized groups. In Feminist Narrative and the Supernatural, scholar Katherine J. Weese discusses how works such as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis “engage with the real by highlighting historical clashes about the nature of reality and the efforts of a dominant group to impose its world view on a marginal group” (15). Our students might, in fact, have the most experience with representation of diverse characters like themselves in genre fiction. For example, Zoraida Córdova’s young adult fantasy novel Labyrinth Lost features a bisexual Latina main character, while Octavia Butler’s speculative novel Fledgling has a young queer-coded Black girl, and the young adult romance Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde has two narrators, one of which is a bisexual woman of color and the other of which has autism and an anxiety disorder. If there are students who come to our classrooms with genre fiction as the main place where they’ve seen themselves represented, then the dismissal of the genre might be viewed as dismissing this vital representation

An inclusive approach to pedagogy, one that integrates or is at least open to genre fiction in the creative writing classroom, is a move toward open-mindedness and inclusivity, and therefore is a sound pedagogical practice. The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning writes that

Inclusive teaching refers to pedagogy that strives to serve the needs of all students, regardless of background or identity, and support their engagement with subject material. Hearing diverse perspectives can enrich student learning by exposing everyone to stimulating discussion, expanding approaches to traditional and contemporary issues, and situating learning within students’ own contexts while exploring those contexts. (par. 1)

Inclusivity can be implemented not only in reading assignments but also in the workshop. For example, if a student is a fan of fantasy, what might they offer in workshop feedback coming from that space? What can they guide their peers towards or away from in terms of plot, themes, and clichés? Kevin Gannon writes in “The Case for Inclusive Teaching,”

How do we erode those old inequities and power imbalances in the classroom? By intentionally using teaching strategies that promote a sense of belonging, a critical element of student learning, and thus, of student success writ large. Active-learning techniques—like sharing the responsibility for leading discussions or framing classroom expectations with our students show them they indeed belong in this ‘scholarly space’ and give them the confidence to engage with the course and one another. A well-organized class that invites regular student participation is a critical element in fostering a sense of belonging. (par. 21)

We can center student writers in areas where they have foundational knowledge (or even expertise) in order to make the workshop experience especially collaborative. As instructors, we should certainly offer our training and expertise, but it is prudent to accept that we are not experts in all modes of writing; it is empowering to students whose voices are valued when they have read into different discourse communities than our own. Put into practice, when we encounter a student’s story in a genre outside of our usual interests, we can ask students who are performing workshop direct questions such as, “Who is familiar with this genre?” “Are there any tropes here that seem overly familiar?” or “Is anyone not familiar with this genre, and are there any places where you are lost?” We can also ask the student being workshopped about their intended audience and whether or not they want to make their work accessible to those unfamiliar with the genre. These questions are what guided workshops in my Spring 2020 Advanced Fiction workshop, and, as a result, students who were being workshopped were able to contextualize their feedback (both that which they gave and that which they received), which made the process easier when it came time to revise.

Lev Grossman writes that “Stories are stories, and their relative proximity to reality is not germane. What’s germane are the ideas and emotions that those stories create in those who read them. Fiction is never real, but feelings always are” (par. 17). As creative writing instructors, we have the opportunity to break the taboo of genre fiction, which in turn allows us to challenge elitism and exclusivity. Situating genre fiction as lesser-than perpetuates a cultural idea that literary realism is the only true art, and this can stifle the organically intuited craft elements that our students might possess from consuming genre fiction, such as a sense of tension and plot. The academy has a reputation as elitist; so does creative writing in the academy. We can challenge these conceptions by turning to inclusive pedagogy. Learning from many different kinds of writing—diverse in genres and in authors—gives writers practical, post-college applications for their writing. If we force them to write a particular genre (i.e. literary), it might not give them the tools that they want or need to work on the art that they’re moved to create.

Notes

1. This assertion is likely too clear-cut a distinction, but it does point to what are traditionally considered the strengths of literary and genre fiction. As will be discussed with texts such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” relegating a craft element such as “subterranean themes” solely to the purview of literary fiction can be reductive. Ultimately, Percy makes the argument that all of these elements can be well-implemented in literary or genre fiction.

2. The caveat here is that, of course, literary realism can do this as well. “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, and “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” by Danielle Evans, are only two examples of literary realism that achieve this; I have used both of these examples in my own fiction workshops. 

Works Cited

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Bell, Matt, Ru Freeman, and Matthew Salesses. “Decolonizing Craft: The Future of Creative Writing Instruction.” Facebook, uploaded by Literary Cleveland, 27 Jul. 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=296808918098467&extid=KQr98ZwoIz7qK1cm.

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