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Interfictions 2

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Delia Sherman, Christopher Barzak

November 2009

John Madera

Interstitial fiction is imaginative writing that slips through the cracks between literary genres. It’s an umbrella term under which numerous stylistic approaches like new weird, slipstream, fantastica, liminal fantasy, transrealism, and many more may fall. Though these terms lack precision, they do bear some resemblance to more established genres, using familiar science fiction tropes like spaceships and aliens, time travel and alternate histories; fantasy tropes like ghosts, fairies, as well as mystery and romance conventions. Interstitial fiction is distinguished by how it blurs the boundaries between genres and, if ever placed in one of these slots, rests uncomfortably. It blends the realistic and the fantastic in such a way that everything is defamiliarized, or where everything is (borrowing a term coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky) “enstranged.” Paradoxically, it is its “in-betweeness” that defines it.

Interstitial fiction is imaginative writing that slips through the cracks between literary genres. It’s an umbrella term under which numerous stylistic approaches like new weird, slipstream, fantastica, liminal fantasy, transrealism, and many more may fall. Though these terms lack precision, they do bear some resemblance to more established genres, using familiar science fiction tropes like spaceships and aliens, time travel and alternate histories; fantasy tropes like ghosts, fairies, as well as mystery and romance conventions. Interstitial fiction is distinguished by how it blurs the boundaries between genres and, if ever placed in one of these slots, rests uncomfortably. It blends the realistic and the fantastic in such a way that everything is defamiliarized, or where everything is (borrowing a term coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky) “enstranged.” Paradoxically, it is its “in-betweeness” that defines it.

Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing gathers twenty transgressive stories from writers unencumbered by the desire for their work to fit easy market categories. “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” explores the thin membrane between dreams and waking life. “The Beautiful Feast” is a marvelous tale (mystery? ghost story?) about a man searching in Vietnam for his missing-in-action father. In “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken,” a purposeless Polish retiree figures out a way to travel back in time to make a long dead monarch “retrace” his steps on a pivotal night so that the “the course of Polish history” is changed. Peter M. Ball’s “Black Dog: A Biography” is about a man followed by a black dog who breathes fire and swallows up most of his girlfriends. It’s an extraordinary tale marred only by the ordinary dialogues between him and the dog. “Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse,” by Camilla Bruce, incarnates the creative spirit. Amelia Beamer mixes metafictive elements with ghosts in “Morton Goes to the Hospital,” and cooks a strange brew. William Alexander’s “After Verona” explores the places where the land of the living overlaps with the land of the dead.

“Valentines,” by Shira Lipkin, is about a woman who, having suffered from a seizure, lost “swaths of long-term memory” and is unable to incorporate new memories with whatever is left of her old. Drawn from Lipkin’s personal experience, it is, she writes, “an extended seizure state. It could be many-worlds quantum physics. It could be magical realism.” It deftly limns the ever-shifting boundaries of identity, time, place, and space of disassociated states. Nin Andrews’s “The Marriage” is a dark fairy tale that viscerally conveys how love changes us, how union demands compromise and acceptance that some things may never change.

Sometimes the story’s form itself mirrors its interstitial quality. Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “The Score” is one example of this approach. She explains: “It’s in the spaces between the pieces of this puzzle that the reader finds a story.” Brian Francis Slattery’s “Interviews After the Revolution” is structured as interview responses by business people, musicians, and politicians shedding light on how a group of four musicians unwittingly jumpstarted a revolution. And there is “The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory,” where Dunbar, a neuroscientist, in a kind of fragmentary tribute to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, develops a drug that will suppress traumatic memories.

“L’lle Close” is Lionel Davoust’s rewriting of the familiar Arthurian legend. Stephanie Shaw’s “Afterbirth” is a hilarious recounting of giving birth to twins with a twist: dragons inexplicably but believably appear, as does a four-headed obstetrician.

Two of my favorite stories animate the inanimate: “The 121,” by David J. Schwartz, is set, like Alan De Niro’s “(*_*?) ~ ~ ~ ~ (-_-): The Warp,” in a convincing post-apocalyptic U.S.A where an explosion is sentient and carries the souls of its victims. The narrator of Interfictions 2’s strongest story, “Remembrance is Something Like a House,” by Will Ludwigsen, is a house that travels cross-country to have a conversation with one of its former occupants. Actually, it endures the hardships of incremental movement across eight hundred miles, from Ohio to Florida, in all kinds of weather, for a span of over seventy years, to offer the last remaining member of a family, the son of a father who was executed for supposedly killing a child in the house, a confession.

At the end of each story of Interfictions 2 is an entry by the author about how their story was written, offering perspectives about genre, formal constraints, what can be accomplished through the ignoring or blurring of boundaries. Unsurprisingly, it is Will Ludwigsen who offers what is perhaps the most succinct and precise definition of interstitial fiction:

[It is] fiction that, regardless of the tropes and traditions involved, taps into universal emotions with a certain verve, awe, enthusiasm, risk, and abandon—a tossing aside of normalcy in the brave pursuit of some aesthetic or thematic end. Interstitial stories tend not to care what genre they belong to, what traditions they confront or invent, what audience they find. Their writers have simply written with every tool they’ve got: robots, ghosts, creeping houses, whatever. They’ve held nothing back, even risking embarrassment or failure.

Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing performs the paradoxical feat of containing what does not want to be contained: a collection of inventive, genre-flouting stories that unnerve as much as they delight.

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