This year at WisCon, Terri Windling, Delia Sherman, Heinz Insu Fenkl and others kicked off a project discussed at last year’s convention: the Interstitial Arts.
They’re interested in creative work that happens between boundaries (genre and mainstream fiction, commercial and ‘fine’ arts).
Heinz Insu Fenkl wrote an essay for the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s site trying for a theory of the Interstitial. Now the physics analogies made me wince, but a key point is that novels that are interstitial, Fenkl mentions Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, have the peculiar property of classifying the writer, in the market, contingent on who reads them. In the case of Kirsty Gunn, she had a critically acclaimed ‘mainstream’ first novel, but her second novel was a fantasy. The critics who like the first novel didn’t like fantasy and the marketing for the second novel imploded.
Given that, it’s not surprising that writers such as Atwood go to great lengths to deny a particular work of theirs is anything but mainstream, for fear of getting classified as a genre writer and forclosing their access to the mainstream in subsequent work.
