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The panel discussion at Fordham yesterday was awesome. (And believe me, that’s not something I say about every panel I see.) I knew two of the panelists, Marleen Barr and Paul Levinson, so it was good seeing them again. The panelists were all very interesting, articulate, and funny. They read from their work, and discussed why genre fiction is fabulous. (There was a refreshing lack of an alternate viewpoint.) I had never heard of Eloisa James before, but now I’m extremely curious to find out what a romance novel reads like when it’s written by a woman who’s a Shakespeare scholar, a graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, and the daughter of a famous American poet. And to quote her, “Shakespeare was a genre writer, down the line, never wrote outside his genre. He was not an innovator. Because it’s really quite a recent idea, that the best books have no genre … most of the books we study as academics are firmly within one genre or another.” And, “In the Renaissance, it was considered challenging to write within a genre.”