Great selection of questions and replies, Connor. Love the Q&A style. I agree wholeheartedly on the desire for autofiction to meet a swift literary death, and I also appreciated your thoughts on McCarthy, Blood Meridian and the tendency of some to replicate (poorly) his many poetic eccentricities.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Genre-bending seems like it's a solution that comes with its own set of problems; you get to jettison the artificial restrictions of genres but come running up against the forces that manufactured those gaps in the first place. But you're probably right that 'ambitious' genre fiction isn't in a decades-spanning, slow motion crisis the way the Serious Literary Novel is.
Speaking of artificial categories: is 'autotheory' just another name for 'autofiction'? I was under the impression that autofiction was stuff like Knausgaard and autotheory was stuff like Maggie Nelson, who definitely isn't a novelist. But I guess it's not unusual for the people who've laden one label with an unsavory reputation to try to adopt another one.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this Q&A newsletter and look forward to what you've got coming next week.
For here or for a future Q&A: how has being on twitter changed your longer-form writing? Has it helped improve your economy of language? Does it make it harder to craft nuanced ideas? You seem like a rare person who can be on twitter a lot and keep some semblance of an attention span, so I'm curious what you think of it.
(Relatedly, that's one reason I'm glad this newsletter exists--there are like ten people on twitter who are consistently insightful, and once they all have podcasts or newsletters I can finally log off (I will not))
Great selection of questions and replies, Connor. Love the Q&A style. I agree wholeheartedly on the desire for autofiction to meet a swift literary death, and I also appreciated your thoughts on McCarthy, Blood Meridian and the tendency of some to replicate (poorly) his many poetic eccentricities.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Genre-bending seems like it's a solution that comes with its own set of problems; you get to jettison the artificial restrictions of genres but come running up against the forces that manufactured those gaps in the first place. But you're probably right that 'ambitious' genre fiction isn't in a decades-spanning, slow motion crisis the way the Serious Literary Novel is.
Speaking of artificial categories: is 'autotheory' just another name for 'autofiction'? I was under the impression that autofiction was stuff like Knausgaard and autotheory was stuff like Maggie Nelson, who definitely isn't a novelist. But I guess it's not unusual for the people who've laden one label with an unsavory reputation to try to adopt another one.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this Q&A newsletter and look forward to what you've got coming next week.
For here or for a future Q&A: how has being on twitter changed your longer-form writing? Has it helped improve your economy of language? Does it make it harder to craft nuanced ideas? You seem like a rare person who can be on twitter a lot and keep some semblance of an attention span, so I'm curious what you think of it.
(Relatedly, that's one reason I'm glad this newsletter exists--there are like ten people on twitter who are consistently insightful, and once they all have podcasts or newsletters I can finally log off (I will not))
Rachel Cusk was my dissertation prof lol!