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HYBRIDS
Increasingly, much experimental writing is described with the moniker “hybrid,” an area that has a growing corpus of associated anthologies, courses, and recognition in the publishing world. Although there are other types of hybridization (YA with cross-over appeal to adult audiences, works that are hybridized in the languages they use, or texts that function both on and off the page, for example), “hybrid” work for our purposes is defined as a blending of genres greater than the sum of its parts. In this category, we confine ourselves to hybrid work in established subgenres. These include prose poems, lyric essays, and flash, as well as lesser-known subgenres of hybrid writing such as haibun, epistolary novels, letters in verse, verse plays, closet dramas, dramatic essays, all-dialogue stories, verse novels, verse autobiographies, autofiction, and autotheory. Other types of writing that are designated “hybrid” can be found elsewhere in our taxonomy—especially under Composites and Unclassifiables.
Links
● Harryette Mullen, “Sleeping with the Dictionary”
● Lily Hoang, “Into Innocence”
● Etgar Keret, “The Greatest Liar in the World”
● Yasunari Kawabata, “God’s Bones”
● John Ashbery, “Haibun”
● Bram Stoker, Dracula
● Jack Spicer, “Second Letter to Federico Garcia Lorca”
● Joe Wenderoth, Twelve Epistles from Letters to Wendy’s
● Kirk Wood Bromley, “The Bangers’ Floppera”
● Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
● David and Stephanie Lewis, “Holes: A Dialogue”
● Amie Souza Reilly, “Icarus in One Act”
● Arianne Zwartjes, “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory”
