Recently, I caught up with a longtime writer friend over lunch. We talked about our current projects and then moved on to chat about other aspects of our lives for a good hour or so.

Then, out of the blue, my friend blurted out, “Amphibious kind of defies genre, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, laughing. “You know me. I’ve never stuck to one genre before. No need to start now. Besides, what are genres for anyway?”

Speaking from her wealth of knowledge as a person with a graduate degree in library science, she replied, “So people can know where to find the books.”

Touché.

Well, sort of.

And that’s my point: the sort of.

As a biracial Christian with moderate political views, nothing is ever clear-cut for me. Everything is always, “well, sort of…” People’s perception of my race, my understanding of my own theology, my convictions about hot social topics, what I want for lunch, everything. I don’t think I am in the minority in this way, especially if people were to take a step back from how they think of their lives and look at what their lives are actually like.

Humans have a propensity to categorize everything, but it is a well known fact that we do so rather sloppily. We would really love to live in a world that had clearly defined lines to make everything easier to understand. Some people would even say that we have to do that. So, book genres are just another way that we make sense of our world.

I think of the concept of book genres like race and like life:

It is like race because it is a social construct upon which so many people rely. We sort people into racial categories to try to establish how we should relate to them and what we should expect from them. Those of us between categories or claiming multiple categories can be thought of as disorienting; people just don’t know where to put us. The same can be done with books. If a book contains aspects of multiple genres, it can be difficult to know where to put it––physically in a library or just in the preconceived categories in our mind. Humor is a somewhat positive response to this confusion; hatred is not. But what if, when we are unable to categorize a book (or a person!), we just spent some time getting acquainted? That’s certainly what my above-mentioned writer friend has done with me, and we’ve been good friends for over a decade. Food for thought…

The concept of book genres is like life because life––if we’re honest about it––doesn’t follow one genre, even if some people wish they lived in a thriller, mystery, erotica, or yes, a horror story. Don’t laugh. I know some unique human beings… Anyway, our lives are complex messes that likely involve elements of any of the existing literary genres (and some that don’t!). So, why should that not be reflected in the actual stories that we read? Could it be that we’re afraid of mixing genres because we just want to know what to expect? Life is unpredictable against our will, so at least our books should give us some respite from that, right?

Maybe. I’m not sold on the idea, though. Books that are unpredictable, as long as the story is one worth reading, can still be enriching.

I had a test reader who expressed well-meant concern about how Amphibious has these moments of thrilling suspense and action interspersed with slower, human interest, homey sequences. It defied his understanding of how a story should work. I took his opinion seriously and thought long and hard about it, but I ultimately realized that I could not change the genre-defying aspect of Amphibious without making it into a story that it was never meant to be.

As a person contributing to biracial literature, I am ever-conscious of the expectation to over-explain the ethnic identities of my characters. While I bend away from that as much as I reasonably can, I suppose a true biracial viewpoint can be seen in the way that Amphibious defies genre. Mixed people don’t often get the privilege of being identified as or accepted by our own people. We are thought to be something else because we contain within our being elements of––and love for––other people groups.

Are we something different? Or are we simply what has been before, just packaged together instead of separately?

All of my work, not just my fiction, tends to defy genre. And if that is troubling, I encourage readers to sit with that discomfort for a while. That discomfort is what most mixed people take for granted and some learn to enjoy.

Finally, I’m not trying to say that we should dissolve all categories that have ever existed, even racial ones. That would probably be as chaotic as having really badly defined categories. Categories on their own are not problematic. However, what we do with categories can be. To be honest, I’m not sure how much my work provides a solution to how we should think of categories or use them. But that’s part of the joy of writing for me: I’m bringing up the issue to get us to think.

I’m still thinking. I hope you are, too. 🙂