We label all of the work in NER by genre. It’s something the magazine has always done and that most lit mags do. Genre is a way of telling the reader something of what to expect and how to read the piece: what level of attentiveness to apply to each word, how much to suspend their disbelief, and what conventions may be in place.

Assigning genre is itself a convention, though, and breaking convention is what art asks us to do. It allows us to see what assumptions we held in the first place and to see the interplay of freedom and restraint, which has real-world repercussions. Literary genre is not always clear anyway: there’s autofiction vs. memoir, prose poem vs. flash fiction, etc. What if we just throw out the practice of genre labeling altogether? Poets threw away meter and verse, fiction writers broke out of Freytag’s triangle, and nonfiction writers employ their subjectivity and imaginations. Many genre conventions, and the lines between the genres, seem only to have been codified in the twentieth century anyway, when English-language literature, and then creative writing, began to be taught as academic subjects. Who needs them?

Free verse became the norm for English-language poetry in the middle of the twentieth century—it’s now the convention—but less than a hundred years ago Robert Frost famously said, “I would no more think of writing free verse than of playing tennis without a net.” He loved tennis and he loved to write in meter and he wasn’t alone. Less famous was Carl Sandburg’s rejoinder: “I have not only played tennis without a net but have used the stars for tennis balls.” There was a lot of arguing about what was real poetry, but by now poets can put the nets anywhere they want. Each poem establishes its own rules for how it should be read; formal constraints are optional. A poem is still different from prose, though. By calling something a poem we ask the reader to slow down, be prepared to be disoriented, pay attention to the feel, the sound, the look of the words. There are still nets in place, but they’re not in the center of the court.

Like contemporary poetry, fiction has also thrown off what were once the assumed conventions of the genre. Rules about narrative arc and how to write effective dialogue can still be useful for creating a story, but by the time NER came around in 1978, writers were already breaking those rules, with postmodernism and other inventions, which was a return to the rulelessness of prior centuries. The one convention that seems still to be in place is that the speaker/protagonist is not to be confused with the author. The formal nets may be down but the veil remains in place.

This is where literary nonfiction distinguishes itself from both fiction and poetry. Although it has come to use the techniques of both—dialogue, lyric image, even the second person POV—making it harder to recognize (ten or fifteen years ago we probably would’ve just called this fiction), literary nonfiction is alone in removing the veil between speaker and author. There’s something exciting about this, not just because humans love gossip and anything “based on a true story,” but because it requires the author to own up to their particularity and subjectivity. It subverts the very idea of objectivity and admits that everything is seen through the lens of the author’s experience and identity, whether they’re conscious of it or not. By calling it nonfiction the author is just saying that the “I” is me, and this really happened, at least as I see it.

Some nonfiction in NER serves a different purpose; it’s more about argument or verifiable information than about the author’s artistry. But more and more literary nonfiction—even when it includes verifiable facts or serves as criticism—is so liberal with its artifice that it could be called fiction. By the same turn, some fiction and some poetry is so autobiographical that it might be more meaningful to just call it nonfiction. But for now, genre label is the author’s choice. All the nets may be coming down in all genres, but poets and fiction writers still hold onto that veil.

NER always includes genres other than fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and one place where it’s essential to know the genre is with “libretto.” If a reader didn’t know to read this as the text of an opera they’d be missing out on the challenge and the fun, which comes in the effort of imagining the music, the stage set, and so much else. This particular opera also brings other, relatively recent, literary works into play, making it an act of interpretation and creative criticism as well.

We also use “translation” as a category on our table of contents. By doing so we emphasize not whether it’s fiction, poetry, or nonfiction but that it was originally written in a language other than English. Literature in other languages doesn’t tend to adhere to our genre distinctions anyway, so it’s convenient to have “translation” as a catch-all, but it’s also a way to experiment with getting rid of the labels and to discover that there’s some pleasure and profit in not knowing. 

I like to think of genre as a matter of nets and veils, because nets and veils, which provide cover and establish boundaries, also reveal and catch. Our cover artist Suzanne Jackson also employs nets and veils in her work, which itself often raises the question of genre: is it painting or sculpture? How do you approach something if you don’t know what it is? That’s one of the difficulties of art—literary and otherwise—that we have no interest in solving. The hope is that some kind of truth will be both hidden and revealed in the experience of the piece, and to allow that, when caught in the net of art—no matter the genre—a simple object like a peanut shell will become something else altogether.

—CK

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