On Hybrids

I've been thinking about hybrids and how many of THE LUNATICS' BALL "essays" are hybrids, and how difficult they are to publish, that is, even to decide whether to submit them as nonfiction or as fiction (they're certainly not short stories). I love to base lyrical and fictional riffs on nonfictional material; I don't always preface them by stating that I'm "perhapsing" or that they're works of imagination (obvious, I think). So what are they? Corresponded with the editor at PERMAFROST about whether to include my upcoming pub with them in the Nonfiction section of their Table of Contents or their Hybrids section. (Yay! They have a Hybrids section! We settled on there.) Have also been talking to my editorial team at CRAFT about a fantastic hybrid submission that has a very low quotient of nonfiction compared to a fantastical dream memory that dominates the piece.

Found this today in a new interview of Erin Vachon in SMOKELONG. "Yes, hybrid is such a weird word. I’m really saying I love smashing two disparate things together to make something new. Some consider flash to be hybrid, a combination of the short story and the poem. Others need an image or multimedia component. I’m less interested in definition than I am in how that word catapults us forward. Hybrids have hooked me for a decade, since I was in graduate school, and I first leapt into erasure poetry, studying strange creative nonfiction. Incredible creativity manifests in hybrid forms because there are no external restrictions, only the author’s self-imposed constraints. That’s what gets me excited: an author who claims their power by designing their own form, since every hybrid has its own architecture."