Let Me Write Dragons

September 2023

My finest work as a high school student was an essay on Dante's Divine Comedy. My AP Literature class was heavily focused on the division between literary fiction (worth our time) and commercial pap (don't even glance at it lest it sully your academic purity). I argued that despite its place in the canon, Dante was actually highly commercial, essentially genre fiction, or worse. I distinctly remember comparing it to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. And, of course, it was set in Hell. It was pulp fantasy, retroactively assigned value because of its historical context.

When I say we spent a lot of time on learning to discriminate between literary and commercial writing - I got in fights over it with my teacher, who I otherwise worshipped. Our very first assignment was to read two short stories and decide which had more literary merit. One, to my mind, was an exciting, clever tale that said something interesting about the human condition - you know, that thing every magazine submission page ever says it wants? The other was a slow, boring slice-of-life vignette about snowshoeing through quiet woods. I'm pretty sure there was also a rabbit death at some point, because literary fiction has a fetish for dead rabbit as metaphor. I argued that the first story had more to say and the second was a meandering exercise in self-indulgent navel gazing. I remember being quite emphatic about it. And my teacher told me flat-out that I was wrong. Had me redo the essay with the correct answer.

This was neither the first nor the last time I was taught that an interesting story in which things happen is at odds with literary merit.

I'm no stranger to the idea that the kind of literature I like reading, like writing, is second-tier to the hyper-realism of literary fiction. I grew up reading well above my age, reaching for Tolkien at 8 and Bradbury, Gaiman, and Le Guin at 11. I devoured 600 page books in a matter of days. Didn't stop my teachers from trying to direct me to more "serious" literature. Didn't stop my dad from calling my tastes "candy books" and wishing I preferred Twain and Dickens. (Sorry, Dad, if you're reading - I think we see closer to eye to eye now.) All through high school and college, I had to fight to use speculative fiction as focus books for term papers even when those books fit the papers' guidelines. My first creative writing class, my professor strongly discouraged writing in any sort of "commercial genre", because how could we learn proper form and artistry if we were also playing with space or magic?

And that's what it comes down to, isn't it? There is no literary merit outside the strict confines of the real, contemporary world. That's why as I prepare to submit to lit mags, I see over and over: Stories of literary merit only. No genre fiction. No horror. No historical. That's why as I narrow down potential MFA programs, the FAQ pages emphasize their focus on literary fiction and heavily discourage (or outright forbid) work that could be considered genre.

Here's my hot take: disallowing and devaluing speculative fiction is directly in conflict with the aim of exploring the human condition, and certainly at odds with any diversity and inclusion initiatives. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia, alternate histories and alternate futures - all of these have long, long been tools for queer, POC, and other marginalized authors to explore, showcase, and advocate for their own realities in a way that mainstream literary fiction often can't or won't lend itself to. Exploring alternate realities holds up a mirror to our current one, presents us with what's possible or sheds a harsh light on the ways our system does wrong by us. Beloved doesn't work without the ghost. The Left Hand of Darkness doesn't work without aliens. My wife (brilliant, talented, award-winning playwright Rachel Lynett) has a fantastic play set in an alternate future with an alternate past, a play that dives into what it means to be Black, to be Latinx, to be queer. Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry stands on its stark differences from our current reality, and I dare anyone to tell me it doesn't have literary merit. That those differences don't illuminate very real truths about our real world.

There's a frustration in knowing that if I want to move forward in my career - especially if I want my MFA - I'm going to have to suppress my interest in the bizarre, the surreal, the fantastical. In a lot of ways, it feels like looking at a palette of lustrous jewel-tone paints and scraping away all but the grays and beiges and greiges. It feels like I'm being asked to stop talking about what could be, what could already have been, in deference to talking only about what is. Describing the world without demanding it improve. At best, I can draw chalk outlines around the damages, but I can't show how we might have avoided them altogether. I don't want to do that. I don't want to limit myself for someone else's aesthetic.

This is probably the part where someone tells me there are MFA programs for popular fiction. Call me a snob, but that's not good enough. I'm arguing that there shouldn't be a division. Or at least, that the division shouldn't be drawn where it is. I think the market demands and requires so-called "trashy" books - which increasingly feels like "books that are at all enjoyable, how dare it not feel like work" - but I fundamentally disagree that the presence of anything but realism is where the line belongs. Separating out fiction with "genre" elements from the more "serious" programs and publications relegates that fiction to the realm of unserious literature, disrespecting the literary merit a great deal of that work has. Simply put, if I write a compelling, well-told story about, say, a woman dealing with the dissolution of her marriage, it shouldn't matter if the story is set in Manhattan or Middle-Earth. The story is the story. And I would further argue that there is a swath of important, meaningful, textually rich writing that simply cannot exist without speculative elements. It does a disservice to the communities those texts came from, as well as to readership at large.

All this to say: if you say you want to represent underrepresented authors, you need to take into account the ways in which those authors are telling stories. The ways conventional literary modes limit or preclude those stories. The ways in which snobbery is keeping you from seeing the value in stories that don't look the way you think they should look.