Guess That Genre!

The inside of the Spring 2010 Georgetown Review notes that it is “a collaborative effort between the English faculty and students from a variety of departments at Georgetown College, a four-year liberal arts school in Georgetown, Kentucky.” Other than this observation, the issue is pretty uninformative about the journal’s intentions, history, or editorial point of view. There’s no general introduction or letter from the editor describing the contents or inviting the reader to the journal. A very short list of staff notes six positions, including “Editor” and “Poetry Editor,” with no mention of fiction or non-fiction editors. A glance over the Table of Contents reveals a hefty list of contributions, making one wonder how six people put this all together. Alas, the extensive table of contents doesn’t note what genre each piece belongs to, and its organization is a bit confusing.

Halfway through the table of contents, there is a brief, unsigned introduction to the Georgetown Review Contest Winner. The winning entry is a short story, “Peace Comes to the Those Who Wait,” by Luke Fiske. The story itself is very strong—narrated in the first person by an elderly South African woman observing her neighbors and the minor and major dramas that unfold in their lives. It’s like an unreliably narrated, South African Rear Window.

The winning story is followed by sixteen other pieces, presumably runners-up. Like the rest of the journal, no genre is noted—the contest itself, according to the journal’s website, has no restrictions in terms of genre or theme. Thus the runners-up include essays, poems, stories, and short prose pieces of indeterminate genre.

The only clue as to the genre of an individual piece in the Georgetown Review belongs to is the contributor’s bios, listed at the back. This makes reading the journal a game of “guess the genre.” Poems with broken lines are a giveaway and sometimes the contributor’s bio specifies the author’s genre of choice. But occasionally the case is a bit more tricky. Are the three short pieces by Francine Witte flash fiction, brief essays, or prose poems? Witte’s bio states that she is a “poet, playwright, and fiction writer,” which doesn’t much narrow the possibilities. However, it also states that she just published a chapbook of flash fiction, so we’ll go with flash fiction. Certainly “The Baby in You,” “Photo,” “Uncle Thief,” are bursting with compressed narratives: teenage pregnancy, adultery, violence, theft.

What about Katelyn’s Sack’s short piece “Listening”? No drama here, just the speaker listening the quiet world around her: “trees, leaves talking amongst themselves like cars to the asphalt.” In her bio, Sack
says she’s published “poetry, fiction, satire, and artwork,” so that won’t answer our question. I’ll cite the lyricism and use of repetition in “Listening,” and call it a prose poem. Hey, this is fun!

Several of the longer essays are actually fairly easily identifiable as such, as they are excerpts from longer non-fiction works (thank you, bios). And these non- fiction excerpts are the standouts of the journal.

“Principles of Internal Medicine,” is a section from Denice Turner’s upcoming book about “the reasons for depression and prescription drug abuse in the Intermountain West.” The essay is a haunting account of Turner’s mother, “a fluke in our tiny, Utah town,” who, despite a teenage pregnancy and marriage, pursued a career in medicine. Turner recounts how her mother’s faith in both medicine and Mormonism slowly turned on her, reducing her to a physically frail prescription drug addict: “Deeply enmeshed in cultural structures that granted complete power to authority figures, people in our town tended to be rule-followers…As smart as my mother was, she trusted pharmaceuticals like she trusted church authorities.” Turner’s
essay is incisive and clear but vibrates with anger and frustrated love; it’s gripping.

“A Eternal Harvest,” by Karen Coates is adapted from her book of the same title. Coates recounts traveling through the Laotian countryside, among those who make their living “harvesting” scrap metal from leftover bombs, many of which are still active.