Aug 9, 2023
MM: There is a politics to being a writer who refuses to simplify or aestheticize or narrativize in overly familiar ways.
KS: That's one of the issues with giving something a genre. If a book is called “fiction,” we open it and expect a certain experience; even visually, we expect to see words on a page looking a certain way. It's almost like the dilemma of gender; it’s so easy to succumb to the conditioned impulse to engage with something according to what prescribed. But what if there were no set genres and we just approached works of writing thinking, “this is a text?” How would that change our experience of reading it? Probably a lot.
Maggie Milner and Kyra Simone, for BOMB Magazine [x].
