Bending Genre

Margot Singer is a Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA, where she directs the creative writing program. She is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (2017), winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and short-listed for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (2007), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her essays have appeared in the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions, the Sun, River Teeth, and elsewhere, have been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), as well as the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). The co-president of NonfictioNOW, she teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, USA and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.

• Introduction to the Second Edition I. Hybrids1. Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t, Lia Purpura2. Queering the Essay, David Lazar3. The Everbent Genre, Patrick Madden4. Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!, Lawrence Sutin5. Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries, Kazim Ali6. On the EEO Genre Sheet, Jenny Boully7. Reading Samuel R. Delany, T Clutch Fleischmann 8. Beautiful Muddied Waters: On Genre and Veracity, Sean Prentiss9. Listening for the Sound, Sejal Shah10. Split Tone, Lee Martin11. Lyrebirds in the Impasse, David Carlin12. Headiness, Karen Brennan13. What's in Your Purse?: Essays Through the Eyes of a Character Actor, Elaine Passarello14. Propositions; Provocations: Inventions, Mary CapelloII. Structures15. On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document, Margot Singer 16. Text Adventure, Ander Monson17. Adventures in the Reference Section, Kevin Haworth18. Meeting the Ancestor on the Road, Tina Makereti19. Autogeographies, Barrie Jean Borich20. Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water, Ingrid Horrocks21. “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Courage and Creative Nonfiction, Brenda Miller22. Traumatized Time, David McGlynn23. Escapology, Justin Hocking24. Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics, Wayne Koestenbaum25. A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order, Ira Sukrungruang26. My Mistake, Nicole WalkerIII. Unconventions27. On Convention, Margot Singer28. Losing Language, Camille Dungy29. What the Bottles Know, Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas30. 44 Tattoos, David Shields31. Creative Exposition—Anther Way that Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good, Dave Madden32. This Photograph is Evidence of You, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil33. Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History, Michael Martone34. On Fragmentation, Steve Fellner35. Single Mindedness and Whole Heartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop: An Essay in Many Parts, Jenn Ashworth36. Positively Negative, Dinty W. Moore37. Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay, Robin Hemley38. A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by FeiMan, Xu Xi39. The Inclusivity of Metaphor, Nicole WalkerIV. Resistances 40. The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal, Catina Bacote41. The Essay as Resistance, Aviya Kushner42. Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly Francesca Rendle-Short43. Exposition as Resistance: Tell Me the Moon Is Shining, Matthew Batt44. The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance, LaTanya McQueen45. It Is What It Is, Eula Biss46. How It Is: Writing Towards Wonder, Jessica Hendry Nelson47. On Not Being Able to Write It, Wendy Rawlings48. Hermes Goes to College, Michael Martone49. The Convex View, Karen Lloyd50. The Moral Map, Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Come for talk of the essay in all its formal wildness. Stay for a consideration of the form’s power and politics of resistance. Even deeper and more expansive than its first edition, Bending Genre 2.0 is essential reading for serious students, teachers, and writers of nonfiction.