Looking for a little last minute inspiration to help motivate you to hit that send button on your Hybrid Grain Contest for Experimental Writing submission? The deadline is in just two days (November 1 at 11:59pm), so we hope this short Q&A with 2025 judges Sacha Archer and Eric Schmaltz is the procrastination antidote you need!
Q: How would you describe hybrid/experimental writing?
Eric Schmaltz: “Hybrid” and “experimental” are not necessarily interchangeable terms, though they are related. Experimental is aligned with newness. An experiment is often conducted to offer a new perspective or new idea; experimental writing will share that spirit to offer some new perspective on language and expression. Hybrid writing, likewise, maintains that emphasis on novelty but through the specific means of bringing discrete elements together. Hybrid writing might cross disciplines, media, or mode; it makes language sing with that which is external to it. In both cases, something new, unusual, and, hopefully, engaging is created.
Sacha Archer: The bird was a hybrid of a goose and a swan, but it was not experimental (we knew then, as we know now, of many gwans and how they behave, or rather, misbehave,) nor was it writing—but if it had been, it would have been:
Q: In three words, what should the winning pieces be?
ES: transgressive, heterogeneous, affective
SA: feathered, majestic, honking
Q: Three exemplar books of hybrid/experimental writing?
ES: Divya Victor’s CURB
Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator
Joey Yearous-Algozin’s A Feeling Called Heaven
SA: sensory deprivation/dream poetics, damian lopes
A Penny Dreadful, Gustave Morin
Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004/The Joy of Cooking, Tan Lin
Q: Noticed any trends emerging in this field recently?
ES: I’ve noticed a more forceful return to the analogue and handmade in hybrid literary contexts, including the collages of poets Dani Spinosa and Kate Siklosi, the dynamic stamp work of my co-judge Sacha Archer, the beautiful Letraset works of derek beaulieu and Kevin Stebner, plus an increasing interest in zines and zine cultures.
SA: Writers are multiplying, their writing spreading like some Steinian difference.
Q: Advice for hybrid/experimental writers?
ES: To experiment is to risk failure.
SA: Wear a hat.
