This week, we have several treats to add to our series of interviews with Interfictions 2 contributors. The first is Colleen Mondor’s Q&A with editors Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. Colleen Mondor, author of the blog Chasing Ray, is a reviewer for Booklist, Bookslut, Eclectica Magazine, and the Voices of New Orleans. Her interview with Delia and Chris, distilled from the afterword to Interfictions 2, gets concrete about the meaning and usefulness of interstitial fiction and gives us a peek inside the selection process for the anthology. Read the interview here.

We’ve also put up two thoughtful interviews by media scholar Henry Jenkins, who wrote the intriguing forward to Interfictions 2, available here. Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and a co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. Professor Jenkins sits down with Delia Sherman and authors Jeffrey Ford, Carlos Hernandez, Brian Francis Slattery, and Alaya Dawn Johnson for a series of interesting questions.

Here’s an excerpt from Carlos Hernandez’s response to the question “Can we produce works which appeal to popular readers without falling into genre formulas?”

I know people speak disparagingly of Oprah’s Book Club, but c’mon people! She got millions of folks to read Beloved, which is not only one of the greatest books of the 20th century, but as interstitial a work of art as we could ask for. What’s unfortunate is that it takes a decree from Oprah to give popular readers the confidence and motivation to try something outside of their comfort zone. So, solutions? 1) Get publishers and mega-bookstores to stop insisting on narrowly-defined genres (near-impossible); 2) Get Oprah to endorse a lot more interstitial art (not exactly a reliable method); 3) Get writers to keep trying to write innovative work that eschews pretension while at the same time challenges readers – and hope for the best.

You’ll find a complete set of Interfictions interviews here.