On Hybridity: Hybrid Editors Charlotte Slivka and Gabrielle Gonzales in conversation with LIT Social Media Editor Grace Dignazio
“Hybridity is the creativity of necessity.” — Charlotte Slivka
What should the literary hybrid look like? This was the starting point of my inquiry as I spoke with LIT Hybrid Editors Charlotte Slivka and Gabrielle Gonzales to try to get to the bottom of what comprises a successful hybrid text. When I think of the hybrid, I think of work that is slippery and playful, transgressive and unclassifiable; work that skirts the edges of genre to create something wholly new and unexpected. I think of the wildly experimental practices of transdisciplinary artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Don Mee Choi, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Claudia Rankine, many of whom write from diasporic experience or from identities historically pushed to the margins: queer and BIPOC writers, women, immigrants. I think of writing that unsettles its readers and creates a sense of disorientation, such that one might begin to meet the work on its own terms: beyond preexisting categories and literary traditions, in a space entirely its own.
When I take a look at the collection of pieces published in LIT’s Hybrid section, I notice a deliberate collapsing and fracturing of form. No two pieces appear alike, each disparate, frankensteined into something monstrously lovely. Yet certain themes surface again and again across works: a sense of straddling unbelonging, of shifting identities, of displacement and multiplicity. What emerges is less a unified structure than a shared orientation: a writing practice born of risk and necessity.
In my conversation with Slivka and Gonzales, we touch on these themes, as well as on the material qualities of the hybrid: its formal and generic innovations, how it resonates differently with each reader, and the possible futures of hybrid writing. What follows is a glimpse into the myriad features of the hybrid, a category that persists in resisting definition.
Grace Dignazio: When you hear the word hybrid in a literary context, what does it mean to you?
Charlotte Slivka: My mind goes to where it wants to go: where the wild things are. But really, I think about this a lot because as we go through the Hybrid submissions, we realize that literary hybrid means really different things to different people. And so it should. But in terms of what I hear, I hear experimentation; I hear people trying and reaching for undefined or blurred forms and boundaries, forms that are not necessarily acceptable or successful to others but are being tried anyway; I hear the undefinable; I hear the weird; I hear work that resists definition; I hear work that comes with a frustrated huff because there is no easy way to shelve it.
Gabrielle Gonzales: Mostly, I think of the intentional (or sometimes unintentional) blending of various elements such as genre, themes, and language. The hybrid doesn’t care about the boundaries of fiction, or non-fiction, or poetry. It’s quite hard to define because it purposely and somewhat defiantly strays from pre-conceived notions of literature. In a way, it is the act of pulling ideas from different places that seem right to the author. The hybrid has become an expression of someone’s individuality without concern for rules. An experiment of sorts.
GD: When reading submissions, what signals tell you a piece is successfully hybrid?
GG: I look at form first. I can’t help it! If the piece looks interesting on paper, it instantly excites me. While form doesn’t necessarily make a piece successful, it’s always fun to wonder why the words are placed where they are, or why some words are bolded. Maybe only certain letters are capitalized. Either way, that’s the first thing I notice. From there, the narrative has to finish the job. We see if the language is being pushed, and we consider what the story is saying. This writing genre is kind of like a fun puzzle that we as readers try to solve.
CS: The rules around this are notoriously slippery, it’s awful but there are no hard parameters around what is successful. Instead, it’s the ineffable, a musicality sometimes, a play with language that itches at something deeper, something there is no language for… yet. Hybrid wants story, but it also wants poetry, and it also wants what it wants and sometimes we just don’t know what that is. I feel as if I’m making a case for the most successfully annoying genre. I think experimentalism and consistency go hand in hand. In that way successful hybrid writing sits alongside what generally works in other genres: energy, compelling prose, word play that seems to reach for something the author is really feeling, choices that are really connected to the imagining. What doesn’t work is word play for the sake of it. An author can make some strange word choices that on the face of it appear to be faulty translations but when connected to vision no matter how weird, can resonate with even more meaning.
“THIS WRITING GENRE IS KIND OF LIKE A FUN PUZZLE THAT WE AS READERS TRY TO SOLVE.” — Gabrielle Gonzales
GD: How does hybridity show up in your own writing practice?
CS: Formally for me, I like to mix prose and poetry. When the prose gets too straightforward, I personally get very annoyed by my own voice. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy straight narrative prose from other writers, I very much do enjoy a narrative story told well, who doesn’t! But for myself I like it when things get a little bit strange and I have to stop and look and look again. I get curious and I like to try curious things, turns of phrase, and I definitely try words that don’t exactly belong. I write like how I feel: a little feral, rambling with winding lines of logic that make sense eventually. I’m not always understood and I get criticized for taking a disorderly path, or I’ll be complimented for taking the reader on a journey. The truth is: I don’t always know where I’m going. I’d love to go to a writing residency on the island of misfit toys.
GG: To be honest, I’m a genre writer, so I do somewhat abide by some tropes of horror and speculative fiction. However, being on the hybrid team has taught me a lot about my own work. I’ve learned to embrace the unknown, to be able to sit in the discomfort of that. The hybrid has shown me that it’s okay if something I’m trying doesn’t work out right away because it’s an idea, a weird one perhaps, that has the potential to work. It encourages me to bring my own identity as a genre writer, something that I crave to be seen. It has also made me feel more secure in my own vulnerability. Under a story, despite it being fictionalized, is grounded in something true to me.
GD: Do you see hybridity as connected to identity, migration, queerness, or diaspora?
CS: Hybridity has nothing but room, and wide-open space for identity, migration, and queerness. I’m going out on a limb here, so I’ll just say from my own experience that hybrid writers write from a place of psychic and emotional diaspora. There is the need for soft genre boundaries, there is a need for the freedom to write unconventionally. You have to be willing to take a risk, but also most people when confronted with circumstances of identity, migration, queerness, or diaspora don’t ask for risk but they have to take it anyway. Hybrid writing reflects the journey as well as the risk of trying something new. I’m interested when a work falls flat on its face because the journey to the floor was interesting, what happens in the accident, sometimes you can’t know the unintended results until the end. When you’ve been kicked out or ignored for being weird, or for being in the way, or for being the wrong sort of person somehow, you are going to have to be creative with whatever you have access to; sometimes all you have to make something, or a life, are disparate pieces and scraps, I’m talking mentally, emotionally, and physically. To me hybridity is the creativity of necessity.
GG: A lot of the submissions I see have so much to do with identity, whether that be in terms of pride or insecurity or hesitancy. Hybrid is a wonderful place for someone to let that run free, to be raw. I think that even more so now, given the state of the world, the authors who submit to Hybrid are looking for a home to communicate these elements without constraint. Hybrid allows that, given its welcoming nature of all kinds of weird words, forms, and symbols.
“YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO TAKE A RISK, BUT ALSO MOST PEOPLE WHEN CONFRONTED WITH CIRCUMSTANCES OF IDENTITY, MIGRATION, QUEERNESS, OR DIASPORA DON’T ASK FOR RISK BUT THEY HAVE TO TAKE IT ANYWAY. HYBRID WRITING REFLECTS THE JOURNEY AS WELL AS THE RISK OF TRYING SOMETHING NEW.” — Charlotte Slivka
GD: What’s a common misconception about hybrid work?
CS: I don’t want to discourage anyone’s concept, because the versions of hybrid work that come into LIT’s submittable are so interesting. We really love talking about what makes the hybrid hybrid, and what makes it not. I feel like whenever we’re confronted by someone who submits to us from a clearly different point of view our horizons get a little wider. I like not having an answer, you know, the jury is still out.
But I will say what is less interesting to us is when the hybrid is conceived of as a straight mashup of very straightforward prose, with no experimentation with language or point of view, no risk-taking, no vulnerability.
GG: We see a lot of work that is simply fiction and non-fiction combined. Yes, that is hybrid, in no way am I trying to negate that. But for me, hybrid pushes back more; it doesn’t conform. When I see a fiction-non-fiction piece, I want there to be that pushing of language. I want to see elements being brought together. But even still, just be authentic and true, that’s all we can ever ask! Have fun with it!
GD: Where do you see hybrid writing heading in the next decade?
CS: Your guess is as good as mine! I feel privileged to be able to read folks who are going in directions I’ve never thought of. I’ve seen some interesting ideas around language itself, also time and place and POV. Some people really like to go to outer space.
GG: I think it’s only going to get bigger. I mean, we see so many novels that blend genres already. On top of that, having been on the team for five publications, I’m seeing more and more submissions. I think that with the way our lives are set up and with the political climate, more people are gravitating towards a place to rest. Putting the thoughts on a page. Finding creativity in the monotony.
GD: One hybrid writer everyone should read?
CS: Personally, I like poets who veer into nonfiction. Like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha completely blew it wide open for me. Dictee is a great place to start. Also, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Just answering this question: I surprise myself when I realize I actually could go on. There is a lot out there that is genre defying and interesting. It’s more than we think.
GG: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong.
GD: Hybrid in three words.
GG: Creating a puzzle.
CS: The weird stuff.
* * *
Charlotte Slivka was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from The New School and is the recipient of the 2022 Bette Howland Prize in nonfiction judged and selected by Deborah Levy, Honor Moore, and A Public Space. Her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Twenty Magazine, Public Seminar, and 12th Street Journal. She was a 2025 William J Flannagan Creative Arts Fellow and is the current Editor-in-Chief of LIT Magazine, the graduate literary journal produced by the alumni and current students of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at The New School. She is a mom to a miraculous human, a menace to traffic over a good sunset, a lover of the ocean.
Gabrielle Gonzales is a Mexican-American writer based in New York City. She is in the Creative Writing MFA program at The New School, where she serves as the Hybrid co-editor for LIT Magazine. She is originally from Dallas, Texas, but has endured (and loved) NYC for the past 5 years. She writes dark stories with a speculative twist that confront and explore social issues, particularly race and class, which she attributes to her BA in political science.
