On Being Genre Fluid
My day job involves listening to other people’s stories (Spoiler alert! I’m a doctor.) Each patient who walks into my room has their own unique narrative – some deliver their ailments like slam poets, some are dramatists, others unfold like a thriller novel and a few I would even categorize as metafiction. Whatever way the narrative unfolds, if I really want to work out what is happening with their health and their lives, I need to be adroit at reading subtext.As a family physician, I specialize in being general – and I’m proud of this. It involves a unique skill-set in which I need to know a little bit about a lot of things. I work holistically, across a wide range of categories. I can’t call myself a cardiologist or neurologist, although I do know how to diagnose a heart attack, or a migraine.
The same applies when it comes to my writing life. When someone asks me if I’m a memoirist, or a poet, or a novelist, or an essayist, I tell them I am a little bit of each one of those. I used to be embarrassed to admit this to myself, let alone say it, but after three decades of writing anything from haikus to scientific magazine features, I’ve started to grow comfortable in my own skin.
I’m yet to find the correct name for this ‘condition’ – hybrid writer, form merger, genre fluid – but I’ve stopped feeling like an imposter when someone tells me they’re a novelist or an essayist. My writing life parallels my medical career – I’m a generalist. Often, I will sit down in front of the page and allow the form to decide itself, in the same way I never know what condition each patient will bring to the discussion. Whatever the form my writing takes though, I usually realize afterwards that I have woven the personal into each piece.
I know as a doctor I am supposed to stay behind my professional mask, but I think the best kind of medicine is one that has empathy at its very core. And empathy demands a large degree of personal engagement.
People ask me what I do for work. I don’t always know how to answer – am I a doctor, or a writer, or a doctor-writer? The truth is, I’m both. The poignant narratives my patients entrust me with on a daily basis, definitely make me a better writer. But more importantly, being a writer has helped me listen to their stories with an eye for detail and an ear for listening carefully to what it is they aren’t telling me. In my novel The Waiting Room, I have woven the kernels of some of those magical stories into a powerful fictional world.
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Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room, won the Voss Literary Prize (2016) and was released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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Jeanne – I think each writer has to find their own path. If ‘who you are’ is genre fluid, don’t let yourself be pigeonholed! Write what you want and celebrate your versatility! Good luck.
I love that. I’ve struggled with the same thing. I see all these writers who seem to have figured out “who they are” as writers – they write in a set genre, or perhaps a second one. I write whatever comes to me. It makes marketing a bit harder since much of what I write crosses multiple genres at the same time.