Unreality was the name of our game last weekend at AWP in LA.  On the last full day of the conference, Carlea and I attended two panels concerned with the “unreal,” what some might call “weird.”

The first panel, “In the Realms of the Real and the Unreal,” featured panelists Sofia Samatar, Kelly Link, Carmen Machado, and Alice Sola Kim, moderated by Katharine Beutner.  This panel addressed a question we as readers and writers of weird fiction likely often encounter: what exactly is weird fiction?  Readers and writers of any genre are likely familiar with this question and the difficulty of establishing what, exactly, weird fiction is.  What is this thing?  Can we even pin it down?  How does it work?  What are its rules?

In response to this impulse to define and name, moderator Katharine Beutner asked Sofia Samatar about her belief that her “favorite sub-genre is both over-named and nameless, but it still believes in the power of names.”  When we talk about weird fiction, what do we mean?  The weird?  Slipstream? Literary fantasy?  Interstitial?  Sci-fi, speculative, absurd?  The list is endless, and this is what Samatar is getting at when she points to the abundance of names for this particular genre.  The impulse to categorize fiction is indisputable, but as Sofia Samatar said on Saturday, “defining stories piece by piece might be making us dumber.”

The question of definition will likely be one that we at Read Weird will take up sooner or later, but putting aside the question of definition allowed the aforementioned panelists to productively discuss how to make speculative/unreal fiction successful.  For Kelly Link, weird fiction works through the language, in the way its pattern, repetition, and code resemble music, and the way in which the “musicality or stasis of a story moves a reader through a series of emotional responses.”  Samatar, too, focused on language, saying that the “strangeness of fiction returns language to itself.”

Ultimately, the panel turned to a discussion of the underpinning ideas of unreal fiction, and these underpinnings align remarkably across genres: writing is play, there’s beauty in precision and pattern and rhythm, but also in having our expectations upended.  I’d be surprised if we couldn’t all agree that these are the reasons we keep reading and writing, regardless of our respective pet genres.

So then, as moderator Rob Spillman asked at the final panel of the day (“Speculative Fiction: Defining the Rules of a Rule-Breaking Genre,” featuring Ramona Ausubel, Marie-Helene Bertino, Manuel Gonzales, and Aimee Bender): what is at the emotional core of why not hyperreal?  Why pursue genres that make any use of the unreal?

This question, though it contains interesting theoretical implications, seemed to elicit emotional responses.  The panelists each offered their own beautiful and telling insights: responses included the ideas that the “magical feels so much cleaner than the real world,” and that it’s “boring for writers to tackle the realist stuff”; Bertino also told of needing to defend the weirdness in her stories, that “that’s just what it’s like inside [her] head.”

It seems like certain types of readers and writers have an affinity for weird genres, that for one reason or another, weird fiction can do something, scratch some itch, in a way that realistic fiction cannot.  Weird stories, the “Speculative Fiction” panelists decided, can make simultaneous use of literal and metaphorical readings; speculative fiction is not weird simply for the sake of being weird, but rather that weirdness allows readers and writers to access a fragile, emotional core at the heart of an experience.