Challenges in Categorizing Creative Work

Lovely little Blog put out by the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Dan Blask, who asks artists from a diversity of genres how they cope with the challenges of having to categorize their work. Feels like I could have written a whole book on this, but fortunately he gave us a word count!

ArtSake Blog

D.K. McCutchen, writer
It’s challenging to articulate an “Elevator Pitch;” to quickly categorize my work in a fast-paced world that won’t wait around while I fumble to describe how multiple genres intertwine.

I’m fascinated by creative nonfiction (CNF), but don’t interpret it as simply using fictional concepts to tell a “true” story. I don’t really believe in truth. I do believe in Points of View, and everyone’s differ. That’s one soapbox.

Another conflation of genres, in my work, is science and experimental fiction. I did a CNF thesis for a Fiction MFA, with experimental writer/mentor John Edgar Wideman. I wrote experimental CNF and published The Whale Road, after repeatedly hearing from publishers: “Love the idea, love the writing, but why did you write it that way?” I still get that.

Now I’ve added speculative fiction into the mix. I teach science writing and keep up on the latest research. I write to imagine our world in the near future. As we remove species, add climate change, and stir, who will we be? I experiment with language, science and worlds. We lose language as we lose species. If cats are long-gone, what happens when Sandburg’s “… fog comes on little cat feet?” Everything’s connected.

Recently my pitch became: “my work is sometimes-erotic, post-apocalyptic, gender-bender, speculative fiction.” But then a prospective editor suggested it might also be categorized as YA….