Try this exercise. Two interviews in this issue talk about the productive humility of moving from one genre to another—that is, of not being a natural. And that means taking seriously how genre makes meaning possible and different by conditioning a reader’s formal expectations that can be met, inverted, negated, surprised. The process of switching genres also requires a stark level of discipline, even if it doesn’t look like that.

In his interview with Niko Hallikainen, Dennis Cooper talks about his shift from writing poems to writing novels. Personally I wouldn’t be the writer I am in any genre without Cooper’s novels, which he says he approached as a poet, only with a sense that poetry couldn’t actually accomplish what fiction can. Actually his words are: “I’ll read a poem and think like, oh I want to do that, but I don’t want to write a poem.”

I’m as admiring of Cooper’s drive to push through genre—“I truly have no idea how other people write,” he says, “because I never went to school, I never studied writing, I never learned how to write fiction”—as I am grateful for Cecilia Gentili’s reluctant move from performance to writing. “I hated it,” she told Harron Walker in 2022, in an interview that Harron has transcribed in full for this issue. “But this bitch [Cat Fitzpatrck, her editor] was relentless.” Why was she relentless? The interview runs through the “editorial t4t” that brought her book Faltas into the world, which is a real blessing, even if it doesn’t duplicate the genius of Cecilia’s performances, with her special comic timing. And the book isn’t just more durable in time and space than a performance. Cecilia discusses how the book made it possible for her to settle on Faltas’s epistolary format—how the direct address of “mak[ing her] stories directed at somebody” made her stories make sense differently. We continue to mourn Cecilia’s passing in February of this year, and it’s particularly meaningful to read throughout the interview her insights and her jokes in her own voice.

I’m reflecting on these examples because I find it comforting to know that people I admire, people whose writing I feel makes mine possible, struggled through the challenge of learning something new in order to do something extraordinary. I also think that they provide two illuminating answers to questions that we ask a lot at the Project, and that other writers in this issue approach as well: for instance, what can genre do, which is to say what it makes possible. In a spring shot through with horror and possibility, it’s a question that readers, writers, organizers and politically committed people can ask with renewed force and urgency.