Genre is a fiction. Not the other way around.

What I mean by that is that genre is an invention that has been imposed upon literature—likely by publishers and the marketing types they employ—to better sell books to more easily definable audiences, in addition to applying a straightforward system to the organizing, stocking, and display of said books. This is fine. It is after all a marketing-type's job to figure out how to best sell something, anything. The problem however arises when rather than simply market a "product", the marketeer's strategies begin to influence the very inception of a product. So we're now in a situation where publishers and agents will request an author to identify the genre within which s/he is writing and maybe even ask them to have a very specific idea of the exact audience they're writing for. This is terribly detrimental to the act of writing itself as it by definition will narrow one's imagination and introduce blinders to an author's field of vision. Not that I am against constraints. Creative constraints are good to have, but they have to be the right constraints and they have to emerge from a nagging artistic drive. Exempli gratia: I want this novel to be told through a series of letters. Or in the case of other artforms; I want to paint this entirely with coffee stains, or compose this track out of exactly 10 sampled loops. These are creative constraints an artist (and writing is very much an artform) might place upon themselves just to give themselves a challenge or something about the project itself informs them that this is how it needs to be done. Genre is not that. It is merely a selling tool, and when employed as a constraint in the creation of the work it becomes a real-life example of placing the cart before the horse. Picture a world of carriages leading horses and you get a pretty good impression of the world we live in today. Not just as it pertains to literature but virtually to every creative endeavor in existence, at least as far as industry gatekeepers are concerned. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've been asked "What's your medium?" 

First time I was ever asked this I recall being completely dumbfounded and at a loss for words, because I frankly didn't know the answer. It was never something I thought of or even considered before. Any medium I utilized was chosen as a result of what that particular project needed. If it's a medium I know little about, even better: I take it as an excuse to learn about it. I've always preferred to learn and acquire skills through projects that would force me to. Granted, some projects may require the employment of media that I know I have no interest, patience, or capacity to learn, in which case I am presented with a perfect opportunity to collaborate with someone already knowledgeable in the field, a very welcomed change to an otherwise mostly solitary existence.

Worse than being asked about your medium is being asked about your subject matter. As if it were natural for a person to have one single concern to produce a lifetime of work about. Shouldn't each project revolve around its own distinctive subject matter? The only way I might reason doing another project concerned with the same subject matter of any prior project is if that prior project was in some capacity a failure. Therefore, if someone's entire body of work is concerned with the very same subject matter, what does that say about their entire body of work?

Sometimes of course, it isn't entirely in our hands. We're pressured into it. Andy Warhol for years longed to become an abstract painter (likely to do away with the burden of coming up with subject matter), but he'd been pigeonholed (not without some fault of his very own endeavors). Jim Carrey found great difficulty in shaking off his image as a comedic actor, even after his stellar and rather emo performance in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. David Mazzucchelli is mostly talked about for his work on BATMAN: YEAR ONE despite having poured nine years of his life into creating the far more superior ASTERIOS POLYP. William Gibson's coinage of the term "cyberspace" in 1984 is still a talking point in interviews to this very day regardless of what his latest novel is about.

All this to say; any artist ought to be weary when described as a particular type of artist even if said description seems to garner a fair degree of success. You never know how long that description's trendiness will hold, and you most certainly don't know if you'll ever be able to shake it off were you to feel so inclined.

Things are starting to change a little though: "Genre-bending" has been the new buzz word in recent years (wasn't all literature—like life itself—genre-bending once upon a time?), visual artists are sampling from the world's massive repository of art history like hip-hoppers sample from records, and folks will readily combine a mid-century modern chair with an old weather-worn barn-house table they found on the sidewalk and throw in a Persian rug to tie the room together. This is good. Let us do away with the dogmatism of there ever being one narrowly defined way of doing things. Let there be no genre. We live in an age where we are more aware than ever of what is happening in politics, economics, scientific development, space exploration, fashion, and crime all at the same time. This awareness allows us to see how it is all connected, and it is that connection that we'd like to see reflected in our art. If we are ever to bring down the imaginary walls between peoples or the very real walls erected between places, perhaps we must first bring down the walls that govern our very own thinking. Let the barriers between ideas vanish. May the abstract and representation collide into realism and pop with the dada conceptualism of it all. Why let the fashion mags tell you what's in when we can make sure that nothing is ever out? Let's fuse cuisines and live eclectically in every which way, our approach to living as varied as our fingerprints. I want to hear the entirely of music history in a single track and see our kids taught that nothing or everything is equally holy. To hell with left-wing and right wing, east and west, and north and south. Our world is after all a globe floating in space, where there is no up, down, or sideways. This isn't new-age thinking or a call for a new school of thought. There really is no such thing as new-school or old-school. It's time we went Allschool.

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