Genre Euphoria: Why More Poets Should Read (and Write) Romance Fiction
Elaina Ellis on the Basic Human Need to Tell Love Stories of All Stripes
“Anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the ‘inferior’ genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin
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In 2023, romance fiction was the top-earning subgenre of fiction in the United States. Even if you’re not a romance reader—yet—you’ve likely picked up on the buzz. Romance readership has grown exponentially since the hellish year that was 2020, and it was not a small market to begin with. New romance-focused bookstores are popping up all over the country, from Portland, Oregon to Deerfield, Florida.
While bestselling romance fiction remains overwhelmingly white and straight, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ authors are publishing more in the genre than ever before. On TikTok content creators post gleeful odes to their favorite romance tropes, while readers get granular using search terms to locate the exact story they want. And the enthusiasm for romance isn’t fringe. Rumor has it that Roxane Gay and Channing Tatum have cowritten a romance novel. Athlete power-couple Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe will produce a film based on a soccer romance by Meryl Wilsner. Political leader Stacey Abrams recently re-released her romantic suspense novels, previously published under a pen name. And who do you know who is not watching Bridgerton?
Like any social construct, genre can be a site of creativity and invention.Romance genre-fiction is not just having a moment; it’s more like a long-building groundswell, originating from the wide-open ocean that is the basic human need to tell a love story.
So, what’s the big deal about genre? The whole idea of high and low art—the logic used to sift and separate so-called “literary fiction” from “genre-fiction”—is rooted in just about every ugly ism there is. Like any social construct, genre can be used to constrict and exclude, determining which forms of expression have merit and which should be relegated to the guilty pleasure bargain bin. But also like any social construct, genre can be a site of creativity and invention: let’s think romance as camp, romance as self-care, romance as erotic rebellion.
As a student of poetry, and as a queer person, I’ve always been interested in the bounty that can flourish within constraint. The word “formulaic” is sometimes tossed around derisively about genre-fiction. But how is the romance formula so different than the formula for, say, a sonnet, with its fourteen lines, volta, and so-on? Like formal poetry, each category of genre-fiction has its own set of rules, expectations, and rhythms. When a contemporary poet chooses to pour her words into the shape of an English sonnet, she is working with metrical and aesthetic tension, making something entirely new in dialogue with a long tradition.
A romance novel, too, is poured into a form: it must center a romantic relationship, and it must end happily. The lovers meet, they cannot be together, they must be together, they fall entirely apart, then they come back for good and ever after. When a writer engages the “formula” and beats and politics of a romance novel, they are shaping the genre in real time, potentially expanding what it means to love and be loved, what it means to offer pleasure and ease to a reader.
In early 2021, one year into a global pandemic and my own disabling illness, I began to daydream about editing romance novels. As much as I valued the work I did in my “day job” as a poetry editor, in my off hours I couldn’t bring myself to read much poetry. Life had become heavy—too heavy for me to carry, thanks to Long Covid. That’s when I began devouring contemporary romance, not for the first time but with more voracity and curiosity than before. There were books full of impatient prose that did not meet my appetite for music or imagery, but there were also books that completely swept me away, beat by beat, no notes.
Some of my favorites were One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston (“The train plunges into a tunnel, shuddering on the tracks, and the girl makes a soft ‘whoa’ sound…”), Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers (“If you’re out there, Honey Girl, I am singing you a song. It won’t lure you to the depths of the ocean. It’s a song that leads you just to me”), and Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters series (“This man wasn’t just softer and kinder and sweeter than anyone suspected, he was practically made of cake.”)
Around this time, more than a few friends—these were certified literary geniuses, social movement leaders, impactful artists—confessed to me that they were reading romance, too. We swapped recommendations: books by Jasmine Guillory, Alexis Hall, Cat Sebastian, Helen Hoang, Alyssa Cole. We giggled about vocabulary choices used in graphic sex scenes. We discussed whether This Is How You Lose the Time War by Alam El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone qualifies as a romance novel. We asked ourselves and each other, “why can’t I stop reading these?” One younger friend divulged her longtime obsession with the Twilight series. I asked her what it was about those teen vampire melodramas that did it for her, and she got quiet, then shrugged. “It’s probably about healing my attachment wounds,” she said. “She doesn’t get abandoned in the end.” Needing my own healing, I started to wonder what it’d be like to let my editor-brain stretch out into fiction. Into genre.
“What if,” I pitched to my friend Amber Flame, “your favorite poet wrote a romance novel?” This question was the original seed for Generous Press, a new book imprint at Row House Publishing dedicated to high-caliber romance fiction by brilliant queer, BIPOC, and disabled writers. In that first “what-if” conversation, Amber told me she’d grown up reading her grandmother’s stash of mass-market paperbacks, giving her a taste for pulp and smut. We talked about prose style and pacing and heat-levels; I most love a slow burn and she favors a wildfire. “What if we spent our days reading love stories written by and for our people? What if we did this together?”
In 2022, Akwaeke Emezi published a romance novel, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. Having just edited Emezi’s poetry collection, reading the novel felt like a gorgeous fever dream, and a confirmation of the vision Amber and I had been privately spinning for Generous Press. Here was a poet (a literary novelist, a memoirist, an artist) writing romance genre-fiction, and it was filthy and fun and fast and sumptuous and grief-soaked and complex (“she would burn anything, everything, a whole world just to hold on to that feeling. The air had gone from slow molasses to frantic whitewater in barely seconds”). It worked beautifully. Amber and I started texting other writers we love. Write us a love story?
And so it came to be that our first book, Someplace Generous: An Inclusive Romance Anthology features short romance genre-fiction by twenty-two authors, including more than a few poets. Poetry readers might recognize names like Rachel McKibbens, Brionne Janae, and Richard Siken. Siken’s poems have long garnered enthusiasm across genre lines, inspiring romantic fanfiction and even a book cameo on the recent Netflix hit Heartstopper; his flash fiction in the anthology is as dreamy as you hope it’ll be (“A man fell out of the sky, and I took him home”).
Some anthology contributors are already mainstays in the romance community, like Black Love Matters editor Jessica P. Pryde (“Babe, I’m invincible. I can stop anything you throw at me”), while still others are known for “literary fiction” like City of Laughter author Temim Fruchter (“You wait until anticipation. You wait until you are alive. Five. Four. Three. Two. And then you stop waiting”). I am not exaggerating when I say Someplace Generous is stunning in its diversity; we included a glossary at the back of the book that translates words from no fewer than nine languages and even more subcultures. The lovers in this book are trans and queer and cis and straight, disabled, neurodivergent, young and old. We poured the linguistic dynamism of poetry and the inherent wealth that is culture into the formula for romance fiction. And the result?
Genre euphoria. It feels really, really good.
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Someplace Generous: An Inclusive Romance Anthology, edited by Elaina Ellis and Amber Flame, is available from Generous Press, an imprint of Row House Publishing.
