Borderlands Between
by Kimberley Bradford

This Memorial Day weekend I attended WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention, in Madison, Wisconsin. During a panel I was introduced to a new way of thinking about art - one I immediately recognized as being in line with our editorial philosophy at the Fortean Bureau: Interstitial Art.

Interstitial comes from the word interstice, which means to 'stand between' or 'stand in the middle.' "It generally refers to a space between things: a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war, the potentially infinite space between two musical notes, a form of writing that defies genre classification." [1]

The panelists who introduced me to this concept were all members of the Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF), a group of literary, visual, performance and musical artists as well as editors, critics and academics who are all interested in furthering the cause of art and artists that fall between the cracks of genre boundaries. The IAF celebrates " art that crosses borders: the borders between mediums, the borders between genres, the borders between "high art" and popular culture, and all similar borders that artists today are so often warned not to cross. We're not seeking to create a new category of fiction, but to establish a better way of reading border-crossing texts."[2] Delia Sherman defines interstitial works as those that "lurk near or on the borders of two, three, or more genres, owing allegiance to no single genre or set of conventions."[3] Heinz Insu Fenkl adds that they "maintain a consciousness of the boundaries they have crossed or disengaged with; they present a clear awareness of the kinds of subtexts which might be their closest classifiable counterparts."[4]

In this sense, we at the Fortean Bureau like to think of ourselves as a magazine that publishes speculative interstitial works. We've said that we want 'weird' fiction, thus we've indirectly allied ourselves with the 'New Weird' movement represented by China Mieville, amongst others. But really we just love fiction that isn't usual, fiction that does not exist in "downtown fantasy" or squarely in the middle of hard SF. Fiction that shows us things characters from those worlds might look at and say, "How weird!" We like that which sits in-between, that which lurks on the borderlands.

Interstitial can be an umbrella term for all in-between genre categories: slipstream, liminal, New Wave Fabulist, New Weird, plus those that aren't and may never be named.

We are the literary descendants of Charles Fort, a man who opposed all forms of dogmatism. We like to think that he would have appreciated the work of the IAF - after all, he did refer to himself as an intermediatist. He collected and published stories "on the borderland between fact and fantasy." We publish fiction on the "borderland between."

The final point being that we are proud to support the IAF's mission by publishing interstitial fiction, by recognizing interstitiality as a valid way of looking at art, by adding our voices to the conversation.

For more information about Interstitial Arts, visit the IAF's webpage.

[1] Heinz Insu Fenkl, Towards a Theory of the Interstitial [Version 1.0]

[2] Terri Windling, Welcome to the Interstitial Arts Site

[3] Delia Sherman, An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border

[4] Heinz Insu Fenkl, Towards a Theory of the Interstitial [Version 1.0]

 

© 2002 Kimberley Bradford