From Kelly Jean Cogswell’s article (12/22/10) on IAF founders Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman for NYC’s bi-weekly Gay City News :
[W]hile fantasy writers may respect the hard to categorize “Other” in their literature, publishers are not so crazy about books that blur the genre boundaries. If you do fantasy fiction, stick to the conventions. Ditto for other genres like historical novels. At the same time, too many mainstream readers won’t approach books in the fantasy section at all because, as Kushner explained, they have “fantasy cooties.” But label the same books magical realism and stock them elsewhere, they’ll gobble them up. Putting stuff into boxes keeps readers — and books — from crossing over.
Delia, Ellen, and some of their friends have founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation to promote art that crosses genre borders and help writers present themselves to the marketers. The point is not just to sell books, but also to publish good writers who have read widely and bring everything that they have experienced to what they’re writing. “That’s how literature grows. That’s how art grows. By bringing things in, and making something new of it.”
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From John H. Stevens‘ thoughtful post Interstitial Fiction: An Admiring Skeptic’s Meditation (2/3/11) on the blog SF Signal:
Whether a crushingly realist text, or one surreal and deconstructive, we enjoy and wonder at those strings of words by figuring out where the boundaries are and what spaces exist between them. Interstitiality is present in even the most hackneyed, genre-bound text, if often subsumed or lost in the looming shadows of larger tropes.
[Interstitial art] is . . . difficult to isolate and codify because it is simultaneously a new idea and something that artists have done since someone made up a term for “art.”
