Courtesy of Ron Hogan at GalleyCat:

Why Genre Tags Don't Matter

Michael Chabon showed up for the creative writing program at University of California-Irvine in the mid-1980s with a head full of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme... but also J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Ursula K. LeGuin. The plan, he told me as we chatted in a hotel bar last week, was to write "intensely literary fiction that was equally steeped in genre," but he soon found that his classmates were completely befuddled and unwilling to critique the stories he was submitting. "I didn't want to get into a fight every time I presented a story," he recalled, so he wound up writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which ultimately became his debut novel, as an attempt at working within the traditional coming-of-age genre. "In a way, it was a kind of retreat," he admits, "and I've been... sneaking out at first, but now more clearly into the place I always wanted to be."

*snip*

"I don't know why it's such a big deal," [Jeffrey] Ford said of the genre-straddling, to which Chabon replied, "The people it matters the least to are the ones who are doing it.

I'm sitting here thinking, OMG, he really gets it. He really, really gets it. Which is, why he might not be my favorite author, he's most definitely my favorite writer.

And on a day when I needed to see it and remember what it is I love doing.