On Transgressing Genres

Feb 24
3 min read

I think every writer knows the calm after the storm of creation, when our work on a project is done, but for the polishing. When I completed Blood and Soil last year, I had the giddy sense that my novel was indeed ready for the world. But were readers, publishers, and booksellers ready for a story that didn’t neatly fit into a literary genre? How would my own story stand out among the quarter-million new fiction titles published every year, if no one knew how to label or shelve it?

For 150 years, Melvil Dewey’s system for organizing books has been keeping all of us from drowning in an ever-deepening deluge of published work. In high school and college, that man was my copilot as I researched term papers. You could say I was a believer in Dewey’s project to create order in the world of letters. But now I was having a crisis of faith in Mr. Dewey. What would the world do with my historical mystery crime suspense-thriller and queer romance, and socio-political parable? Early on, my team and I decided that B+S didn’t fit into any one genre, but rather, at least four of them—all of which we slapped on the back cover.

Which didn’t address the matter of how anyone would find my novel. My own talks with booksellers suggested that on a manager’s whim, B+S might be placed in the LGBTQ+, mystery, crime, general fiction, or even romance section of a store, making my book about as easy to locate as Joyce’s Ulysses in 1920s New York.

The cold, hard calculus of the publishing industry left me with the panicky feeling that Blood and Soil’s multiple personalities might leave my poor Cinderella of a novel at home in rags because no one knew how to dress it up for the Ball. Or else I could accept that the glass slipper didn’t fit, and throw my own ball.

One way I’ve done that is marketing to book clubs. I’ve reached out to dozens of groups whose own favorite reads shared the slightest affinity with my cross-genre story. When there are book groups as quirky as Dogs Ears and Dead Guys, Blow My Mind, Sonoran Sapphists, and Who Picked This Book? there is hope.

Then again, there is no getting around labels in the book world’s annual awards. The competitions I’ve contacted bestow many honors, but no single one that quite fits my story. The whole system seems like a horse race that my book badly needed a handicap to win. Could I actually win a Romance award, with six bodies piled up by the end of my story? Would two guys in love render a Crime award unwinnable? Was contending for a General Fiction prize just an empty exercise for those of us whose last names weren’t Tyler, Walker, King or Whitehead? What if I garnered an LGBTQ+ medal—would that consign Blood and Soil to a Queer silo, despite its universal themes? Yet covering all bases for every possible award would be financial malpractice, given the steep entry cost for each prize.

Thankfully, my seasoned publicity team, along with a writer friend who had judged and been judged in several awards seasons, helped me craft a realistic strategy. Still, it’s worth asking myself whether a gold, silver, or bronze medallion on my book jacket is really the true measure of my work’s worth. History suggests otherwise, considering the classics of the past hundred years passed over for literature’s top prizes, from authors named Heller, Salinger, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Naipaul, Faulkner, and Bellow. That’s pretty good company to keep.

Truth be told, every bibliophile will decide for themselves just what it is that distinguishes one pinpoint of light from another in a galaxy of scribes. Ultimately, an author must be faithful to their own creative vision, genres and prizes and Dewey decimal numbers be damned. Perhaps being hard to label is its own special award.

For Blood and Soil, the verdict is still out, and I hold no sway with posterity; neither do the judgments of others. In the end, all I have is the unclassifiable spirit of a storyteller. Maybe that is enough.