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Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net
Copyright ©2009 by Interstitial Arts Foundation
First published in 2009, 2009
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CONTENTS
Interstitial Arts Foundation
Contents
Introduction
The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper
The Beautiful Feast
Remembrance Is
The Long and Short of
The Score
The Two of Me
The Assimilated Cuban's Guide
Shoes
Interviews After the Revolution
Count Poniatowski
Black Dog: A Biography
Berry Moon
Morton Goes to the Hospital
After Verona
Valentines
(**?) ~~~~ (—) :
CHAPTER SIX: Please Don't Kill Me!
The Marriage
Child-Empress of Mars
L'Ile Close
Afterbirth
The 121
Afterwords: An Interstitial Interview by
Acknowledgments
About the Interstitial Arts Foundation
About the Editors
Contributors
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Interfictions 2
an anthology of
interstitial writing
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Edited by Delia Sherman
and Christopher Barzak
Introduction by
Henry Jenkins
Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. Copyright © 2009 by the Interstitial Arts Foundation. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved. Not reproducible without written permission.
Interstitial Arts Foundation
P.O. Box 35862
Boston, MA 02135
www.interstitialarts.org
[email protected]
Distributed to the trade by Small Beer Press through Consortium.
Printed on recycled paper by Cushing-Malloy. Text set in ITC Esprit.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-61-4
First edition: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
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Cover art © 2009 by Alex Myers.
"Introduction” Copyright © 2009 by Henry Jenkins.
"The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Ford.
"Beautiful Feast” Copyright © 2009 by M. Rickert.
"Remembrance Is Something Like a House” Copyright © 2009 by Will Ludwigsen.
"The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory” Copyright © 2009 by Cecil Castellucci. Slides used by permission of Vincent F. Castellucci from the following sources: “The Neuron” adapted from Castellucci, V.F. and Kandel, E.R. An invertebrate system for the cellular study of habituation and sensitization. In: Habituation: Perspectives from Child Development, Animal Behavior, and Neurophysiology. T.J. Tighe and R.N. Leaton, eds, Hillsdale, N.J., Erlbaum, pp. 1-47, 1976; “Simple Reflex Experiment” and “The Hippocampus” adapted from Principles of Neural Science, 4th edition, Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell editors, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000.
"The Score” Copyright © 2009 by Alaya Dawn Johnson.
"The Two of Me” Copyright © 2009 by Ray Vukcevich.
"The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria” Copyright © 2009 by Carlos Hernandez.
"Shoes” Copyright © 2009 by Lavie Tidhar.
"Interviews After the Revolution” Copyright © 2009 by Brian Francis Slattery.
"Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Ziemska.
"Black Dog: A Biography” Copyright © 2009 by Peter M. Ball.
"Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse” Copyright © 2009 by Camilla Bruce.
"Morton Goes to the Hospital” Copyright © 2009 by Amelia Beamer.
"After Verona” Copyright © 2009 by William Alexander.
"Valentines” Copyright © 2009 by Shira Lipkin.
"(**?) ~~~~ (—) : The Warp and the Woof” Copyright © 2009 by Alan DeNiro.
"The Marriage” Copyright © 2009 by Nin Andrews.
"Child-Empress of Mars” Copyright © 2009 by Theodora Goss.
"L'Ile Close” Copyright © 2009 by Lionel Davoust.
"Afterbirth” Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Shaw.
"The 121” Copyright © 2009 by David J. Schwartz.
"Afterword” Copyright © 2009 by Colleen Mondor, Delia Sherman, & Christopher Barzak.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Contents
Henry Jenkins Introduction: On the Pleasures of
Not Belonging v
Jeffrey Ford The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper 1
M. Rickert Beautiful Feast 6
Will Ludwigsen Remembrance Is Something Like a House 15
Cecil Castellucci The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory 28
Alaya Dawn Johnson The Score 46
Ray Vukcevich The Two of Me 74
Carlos Hernandez The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria 81
Lavie Tidhar Shoes 108
Brian Francis Slattery Interviews After the Revolution 120
Elizabeth Ziemska Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken 140
Peter M. Ball Black Dog: A Biography 158
Camilla Bruce Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse 174
Amelia Beamer Morton Goes to the Hospital 178
William Alexander After Verona 186
Shira Lipkin Valentines 196
Alan DeNiro (**?) ~~~~ (—) : The Warp and the Woof 203
Nin Andrews The Marriage 230
Theodora Goss Child-Empress of Mars 232
Lionel Davoust L'Ile Close 242
Stephanie Shaw Afterbirth 259
David J. Schwartz The 121 281
Colleen Mondor, Christopher
Barzak, and Delia Sherman Afterwords: An Interstitial Interview 293
Acknowledgments 303
About the Intersitial Arts Foundation 304
About the Editors 305 Contributors 306
[Back to Table of Contents]
To Terri and Charles and Midori and Kate and Sarah and Warren and Ellen and Gavin and Kelly, who were there at the very beginning.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Introduction
On the Pleasures of Not Belonging
Henry Jenkins
"Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
—Groucho Marx
Let's start with some basic premises:
I do not belong in this book.
The contributors also do not belong.
You, like Groucho Marx, wouldn't want to belong even if you could. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book in the first place.
Let me explain. The editors of most anthologies seek stories which “fit” within prescribed themes, genres, and topics; the editors of this book have gone the opposite direction—seeking stories that don't fit anywhere else, stories that are as different from each other as possible. And that's really cool if the interstitial is the kind of thing you are into.
At the heart of the int
erstitial arts movement (too formal), community (too exclusive), idea (too idealistic?), there is the simple search for stories that don't rest comfortably in the cubbyholes we traditionally use to organize our cultural experiences. As Ellen Kushner puts it, “We're living in an age of category, of ghettoization—the Balkanization of Art! We should do something.” That “something” is, among the other projects of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, the book you now hold in your hands.
Asked to define interstitial arts, many writers fall back on spatial metaphors, talking about “the wilderness between genres” (Delia Sherman), “art that falls between the cracks” (Susan Simpson), or “a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war” (Heinz Insu Fenkl). Underlying these spatial metaphors is the fantasy of artists and writers crawling out from the boxes which so many (their publishers, agents, readers, marketers, the adolescent with the piercings who works at the local Borders) want to trap them inside. Such efforts to define art also deform the imagination, not simply of authors, but also of their readers.
All genre categories presume ideal readers, people who know the conventions and secret codes, people who read them in the “right way.” Many of us—female fans of male action shows, adult fans of children's books, male fans of soap operas—read and enjoy things we aren't supposed to, and we read them for our own reasons, not those proposed by marketers. We don't like people snatching books from our hands and telling us we aren't supposed to be reading them.
One of the reasons I don't belong in this book is that I'm an academic, not a creative artist, and let's face it, historically, academics have been the teachers and enforcers of genre rules. The minute I tell you that I have spent the last twenty years in a literature department, you immediately flash on a chalkboard outline of Aristotle's Poetics or a red pen correcting your muddled essay on the four-act structure. Throughout the twentieth century, many of us academic types were engaged in a prolonged project of categorizing and classifying the creative process, transforming it to satisfy our needs to generate lecture notes, issue paper topics, and grade exam questions. After all, academics are trapped in our own imposed categories ("disciplines” rather than “genres") which often constrain what we can see, what we can say, and who we can say it to. Academics are “disciplined” through our education, our hiring process, our need to “publish or perish,” and our tenure and promotion reviews. Most academics read or think little outside their field of study. As Will Rogers explained, “there's nothing so foolish as an educated man once you take him out of the field he was educated in."
I may gain a little sympathy from you, dear reader, if I note that for those twenty years, I was a cuckoo's egg—a media and popular culture scholar in a literature department—and that I am finally flying the coop, taking up an interdisciplinary position at a different institution, because I could never figure out the rules shaping my literature colleagues’ behavior.
Many literature professors may hold “genre fiction” in contempt as “rule-driven” or “formula-based” yet they ruthlessly enforce their own genre conventions: look at how science fiction gets taught, keeping only those authors already in the canon (Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon), adding a few more who look like what we call “literature” (William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick), and then, running like hell as far as possible from any writer whose work still smells of “pulp fiction.” Here, “literature” is simply another genre or cluster of genres (the academic midlife crisis, the coming-of-age story, the identity politics narrative), one defined every bit as narrowly as the category of films which might get considered for a Best Picture nomination. I never had much patience with the criteria by which my colleagues decided which works belonged in the classroom and which didn't.
What I love about the folks who have embraced interstitial arts is that some of them do comics, some publish romances, some compose music, some write fantasy or science fiction, but all of them are perfectly comfortable thinking about things other than their areas of specialization. In that sense, I do very much belong in this collection as a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, both phrases that signal someone who does and does not fit into some larger movement. Maybe we can go to each other's un-birthday parties and not belong together.
To be sure, academics are not, as Buffy would put it, “the big bad.” We may have gotten inside your head but with a little mental discipline, you can shove us right back out again. Most interstitial artists ritually burned their old course notebooks years ago. They started to write the stories they wanted to be able to read, only to be told by their publisher that their book would sell much more quickly if it could be positioned into this publishing category for this intended audience, and to achieve that you just need to cut back on this, expand on that, and add a little more of this other thing. I often picture James Stewart in Vertigo gradually redressing, restyling, and redesigning Kim Novak's entire identity, all the while creepily asserting that it really shouldn't make that much difference to her. That's the process those of us who sympathize with the concept of interstitial arts are trying to battle back into submission or at least push back long enough so that we can demonstrate that there are readers out there, a few of us, who want the stuff that doesn't really fit into fixed genres, though it may bear some faint family resemblance to several of them at once. Viva the mutts and the mongrels! Long live the horses of a different color!
So, you are now about to enter the Twilight Zone, where nothing your freshmen literature teacher taught you applies, where we eat with the wrong forks and wear white shoes after Labor Day. But it doesn't mean that academic genre theory has nothing to contribute to our efforts as readers and writers to step across the ice floes and navigate the shifting sands of the interstitial. For the next few pages, I will be proposing a more contemporary account of how genre works in an era when so many of us are mixing and matching our preferences and defying established categories. The work of genre is changing as we speak—in some ways becoming more constraining, in others more liberating—and genre theorists are rethinking old assumptions to reflect the flux in the way culture operates.
To start with Genre Theory 101, all creative expression involves an unstable balance between invention and convention. If a work is pure invention, it will be incomprehensible—like writing a novel without using any recognizable language. Don't worry: a work that is pure invention is only a theoretical possibility. None of us, in the end, is all that original; we borrow (often undigested) bits and pieces from the already written and the already read; we all construct new works through appropriation and transformation of existing materials. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, we don't take our words out of the dictionary; we rip them from other people's mouths and they come to us covered with the saliva of where they've already been spoken before. Sharing stories is swapping spit.
However, if a work is pure convention, it will bore everyone. While most of us feel gratified when a work sometimes meets our expectations, and most of us feel somewhat frustrated when a work fails to deliver those particular pleasures we associate with a favored formula, none of us wants to read a book that is predictable down to the last detail. All artists fall naturally somewhere on the continuum, in some ways following the dictates of their genres, in other ways breaking with them. And most readers pick up a new book or video expecting to be surprised (by invention) and gratified (by convention).
As they seek to satisfy our desires for surprise and gratification, genre conventions are both constraints (like straitjackets) and enabling mechanisms (like life vests). They are constraints insofar as they foreclose certain creative possibilities, and they are enabling mechanisms insofar as they allow us to focus the reader's attention on novel elements. In the Russian formalist tradition that shaped my own early graduate education, we didn't speak of “rules"; we spoke of “norms,” with the understanding that a work only achieved its fullest potential when it, in some way, “defamiliarized” our normal ways of seeing th
e world and ordering our experience. Or in another familiar paradigm, the auteur critics embraced those filmmakers who were “at war with their materials,” that is, who followed the expectations of genre just enough to continue to be employed by the Hollywood studio system but also sought to impose their own distinctive personality by breaking as many of those rules as possible.
Now, let's consider how some of the writers featured on the Interstitial Arts Foundation website are confronting these competing pulls towards convention and invention as they think about their work. Some are seeking to break with the conventions of genre more dramatically than others; they each lay claim to different positions on the continuum between convention and invention.
Here, for example, is Barth Anderson:
If the work comforts, satisfies, or generally meets the expectations that viewers might carry of a genre in question, then the work is genre. This might even apply to works attempting to redefine genre or works which introduce alien elements and disciplines into the genre mix ... Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations, work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously.... Interstitial art is often upsetting. It rocks worldviews, political assumptions, sacred cows, as well as bookstore shelves.
Anderson values surprise and sees genre primarily as a constraint.
Susan Stinson, by contrast, sees the artist as moving between the pleasures of operating within genres and the freedom of escaping their borders:
The gifts of being in a genre—reading the same essays and stories; seeking out the same mentors; publishing with the same magazines and presses; writing books that share shelf space; gathering at workshops, retreats, and conferences often enough to know each other—create a common language ... I've felt both embraced and constricted by the conventions of those worlds.... The interstitial idea of thriving in cracks and crevices feels like [another] kind of home. Nurturing active, creative, receptive, demanding relationships and institutions that welcome genre-bending and respect a wide range of sources, traditions, and affinities sounds so good that it scares me. The expanded possibilities for joy are worth the risks.
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