Consider the Tulip Poplar: Do Genre Labels Matter? Charity Singleton Craig August 11, 2015 Word Count:​
1,​
851 We moved into our house late enough last fall that I didn’t pay attention to the leaves on the large tree in our backyard. I had appreciated its shade, especially during those days of Indiana Summer, but I didn’t give a thought to its genus or species. In the spring, when the leaves began to bud anew, I thought I recognized their smoothness and shape. Each time I walked out onto the patio, I had that funny feeling that I had seen those leaves somewhere before. “I think it might be a tulip poplar,” I told my husband one day, though he wasn’t sure, either. In late May, when the yellow and orange buds began to bloom, our family was gathered on the patio for a birthday party. “Well, that’s a tulip poplar,” my dad pronounced as he ate his grilled burger. “It’s the state tree, isn’t it?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the state tree.” And suddenly, all those feelings of familiarity took me back to fourth grade and Indiana history class and coloring the leaves of the tulip poplar on mimeographed worksheets. Did it matter what kind of tree provided the morning shade to our backyard and the pollen to our local bees for honey? Did I enjoy the tree any less before I knew it was in the same family as the magnolia tree? Would the mound of leaves my husband and I raked been any less onerous had I realized we had a state celebrity rooted in our back yard? It wasn’t that we were planning to cut it down if it hadn’t turned out to be the state tree. Nothing like that. But knowing what kind of tree it was made me feel more rooted to this little plot of land where we find ourselves. Knowing how our tulip tree fits into the landscape and culture around us helps me fit a little better myself. :: When people I meet or already know find out I’m a writer, they usually ask what I write. And they aren’t happy if I don’t have a simple answer. Impatient is the word. Why shouldn’t I be able to tell them what I write? It was easier when I was a journalist, but of course back then I didn’t tell people I was a writer. I had the simpler title: reporter. Part of my problem is that I don’t write one thing. Occasionally, I write poetry and short stories. I’ve written a play or two in the past. I am a blogger, but I’ve also written a book. But there is a bigger problem to categorizing my writing: When it comes to literary genres, they feel either too limiting or too expansive. Take the phrase “creative nonfiction,” the genre I would most closely identify with. Author Scott Russell Sanders explains his own malaise with that term: I suppose we do have to use labels, but I don’t find “creative nonfiction” to be an especially useful one, even though I’ve won prizes and taught workshops bearing that title. “Nonfiction” itself is an exceedingly vague term, taking in everything from telephone books to ​
Walden​
, and it’s negative, implying that fiction is the norm against which everything else must be measured. It’s as though, instead of calling an apple a fruit, we called it a non­meat. Sticking “creative” in front of “nonfiction” doesn’t clarify matters much, and it’s pretentious to boot, since it implies that other forms of nonfiction—Plato’s Republic​
, Ellman’s ​
Joyce,​
Hawking’s ​
A Brief History of Time​
—are not creative works of intellect and imagination. For Sanders, and for me, another term works better. Here’s how he describes his own work: “So I prefer to think of myself as an essayist, and to speak of what I write as essays. It’s a term with a venerable tradition, and it preserves Montaigne’s emphasis on essay­ing—on making a trial, an experiment, an effort of understanding.” But “essay” itself takes a bit more definition or explanation. For many, essays were at the center of too many academic nightmares. Themes, five paragraphs, thesis statements, proof, proper citations: most people would rather read anything than an essay. It’s usefulness as a category for non­essayists is in question. In fact, the usefulness of all genre categories may actually be in question. In a recent ​
The New York Times ​
Sunday Book Review article called “​
Do Genre Labels Matter Anymore?​
” authors Dana Stevens and Leslie Jamison offer two perspectives on the ongoing usefulness of putting literary works into distinct categories. According to Stevens, the definitions of genre labels have been so thoroughly distorted that they have outlived their helpfulness. “The role of genre on the cultural marketplace too often seems dictated by trends, either in fashion (zombies are in, vampires are out) or in finance (superhero movies usually do big box office; movies with heroines, super or not, generally don’t),” she wrote. As such, Stevens believes literary works are either embraced or dismissed not on the basis of their quality or literary merit, but simply by their genre. On the other hand, Jamison says that these genre labels do matter but not because literary works always fit neatly into one category or another. Instead, genre helps express intent. “Do genre labels matter? Sure they do,” Jamison wrote. “Not as rigid categorical descriptions but as illuminations of desire. It’s futile and misguided to insist on their absolute boundaries (“All great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one,” Walter Benjamin said), but they do offer a set of crude terms we use to articulate hungers for which we haven’t found or wrought a more precise vocabulary .... That wanting is the molten core—for truth or beauty or resonance—and the texts are just the cooling lava formations that form across the crust, the byproducts of craving. There are important differences between fiction and nonfiction—and I believe in the ethical necessity of fact­checking, which viewed rightly can become its own sort of generative formal constraint—but our uninterrogated absolute distinctions leave much middle ground unspoken for.” :: Assuming that genre labels are not likely to disappear in our lifetime, maybe a better question then is ​
who do they matter to​
? Publishers certainly like them—even require them—as a way to plan for, market, and sell books. In a book proposal workshop I once attended, the leader encouraged us to think about what section of Barnes and Noble our book would fit in and list that accordingly in our proposal. Those who struggled to find such a niche, like me, wondered whether they could ever be published at all. The workshop leader said we were right to be concerned. As such, writers, too, often think in terms of genre, maybe more so if they are publishing their work. For instance, even those of us who are resistant to labels have to know whether or not we have written a poem if we are submitting to a journal that publishes only poetry. For other writers, genre may provide boundary lines that we want to avoid. For instance, I can clearly say that I do not write science fiction or westerns or romance novels. Still others, like author Rebecca Solnit, don’t avoid genres, but just don’t fit neatly into any one of them either. “I have a very clear sense of what I am here to do and what its internal coherence is,” she said in ​
an interview with Benjamin Cohen for ​
The Believer,​
“but it doesn’t fit into the way that ideas and ​
continuities are chopped up into fields or labeled.” At the same time, Solnit recognizes that people who may need genre labels the most are the ones who have the least control over them: the readers. “Well, I want people to read my work,” she said in that same Cohen interview, “I want it to have value for others. I occasionally regret not writing simpler narratives around more tightly defined subjects when I’m admiring one of the better best sellers out there. But I am apparently here to make wide­ranging connections and lateral moves. I don’t think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it’s loved by enough people that I’m grateful and able to keep going.” While publishers want genre labels for the sales and authors use genre labels for the intent, readers are the ones who rely on genre labels as a type of social contract about what it is they are getting when they read a piece of work. “When I write what we’re calling creative nonfiction, I feel bound by an implicit contract with the reader: I don’t invent episodes, don’t introduce characters who were not actually present, don’t deliberately change circumstances,” writes Sanders. “Of course I may change circumstances without knowing I’ve done so, because memory and perception are tricksters. We all realize that no two people, confronted by the same event, will see exactly the same thing; we realize that memory shapes and edits our past. So when I sit down to write about actual events and places and people, I don’t imagine that I can give a flawless transcript, but I do feel an obligation to be faithful to what I’ve witnessed and what I recall. In writing nonfiction, I feel an obligation to a reality outside the text; in writing fiction, I feel no such obligation.” The obligation of writers to readers seems really obvious when you consider high level genre labels. Non­fiction or fiction. Novel, poem, play. But that literary contract becomes blurred the further down into subgenres one goes. Memoir, essay, journalism. Western, science fiction, romance. Not only does the contract become blurry, but so does the definition. Young adult is not a genre, according to the Literary Genre Wikipedia page. It’s an age category. And graphic novel, likewise, is not a genre. It’s a format. So the fictional western romance graphic novel becomes such a Frankenstein of literary genre that the contract between author and reader is all but destroyed. And I, for one, would like to know where that book would be shelved at Barnes and Noble. :: I think of the tulip poplar tree in my backyard again, and I’ll admit that even though I looked at its entire scientific classification (Plantae, Angiosperms, Magnoliids, Magnoliales, Magnoliacaea, Liriodendron, L. Tulipifera), not much of it made sense until I saw the word “magnoliales,” and even then I had to double check the common name of this beauty and the description of its buds to be sure I had the right one. And once I was sure that I had the right one, it wasn’t just its name that resonated with me; it was the historical and personal connections I made with it that made it most significant. I tend to think of literary genres the same way. I may struggle with what to call myself, but when I say “essayist” it means something important to me. And when my readers come to my work, I hope that the labels help them find me, but I have a feeling it’s the words and their connections to them that will make them stay. And maybe come again.