Fictionists Alexandra Chasin, Debra Di Blasi, and Nava Renek at Medaille College

Okay, I’ll say it: A lot of fiction today is boring. For the most part mass-produced by subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates who more and more insist on bottom-line profits, fiction has become our most conservative art form, tending more toward the familiar than the new, staying within accepted genres, and rarely (if ever) surprising us.

In a marketplace where realism or genre fiction are the acceptable formulas, it isn’t surprising that alternative or “experimental” fiction suffers from an identity crisis. What precisely defines experimental, or as here “XXperimental” fiction, besides unpublishability? Who practices it, and to what end? How is it different from commercial writing? Are these differences linked particularly to gender?

This week, three “XXperimental” women fictionists—Alexandra Chasin, Debra Di Blasi, and Nava Renek—will read from their work in Medaille College’s Write Thing Series. All are part of a new anthology of in+novative fiction by women, Wreckage of Reason, edited by Renek and published by Brooklyn’s Spuyten Duyvil Books.

Or maybe they won’t “read”—both Chasin and Di Blasi are known as well for their experiments with digital video, and Di Blasi has described her 2007 book, The Jiri Chronicles, as “a multimedia invasion into the real world.” A visit to her Web site gives use a sense of what this means: Here one finds recordings, images, texts, and a world where the real and the fictional intermingle, seemingly inextricably.

Di Blasi has also, through her Bleed TV project, interviewed many of the contributors to the anthology on videos that can be found on YouTube. In her video in the series, Chasin describes herself as feeling “more like a language engineer than a writer.” Chasin’s prose experiment, “They Come from Mars,” is among the most radical to be found in the Wreckage anthology, composed of only four letter “words” in a grid-like pattern:

Then they walk pour flow ooze down town Rows upon rows flow folk from Mars rows upon rows like ants Dont obey when City Hall says dont Then wewe spec they want fear they want take over take over Wewe spec fear that what they want they want

Experimentation is women’s accustomed domain, suggests Renek in her introduction to the volume. “Women are natural innovators. Their minds are nimble, accustomed to flux. By necessity, they know how to improvise and innovate…”

XXperimentation chromosomal? Who is it that indeed comes from Mars? The answers to these and other questions may well be available this Thursday.

—ted pelton