I believe that literature can have a huge impact on people and culture, and I research ways this can be done.My favorite book for most of my childhood was Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. I was also really into Twitches by H. B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld, The Circle of Three by Isobel Bird, and The Circle of Magic by Tamora Pierce... I obviously really liked fairytales, magic, wicca, fantasy stuff. I guess I've always been into transgression in some form or another. Then high school hit and a friend obsessed with music found out that some of Panic! at the Disco's songs were about Chuck Palahniuk's books, read them, and recommended them to me (and probably everyone else he knew). I read them and also became obsessed. I'd never read anything so raw or real before and I needed more. I eventually read somewhere that Chuck’s writing was called transgressive fiction so I did what I could to find similar books. I'd find Burnt Tongues (edited by Chuck) which led me to new authors published in there, and a snowball of others. These stories and writers impacted the direction of my own creative writing for years. I'd look at how they used language, the unexpected, and form to write powerful, memorable stories and implement it in my own writing. For almost two decades now, I've been obsessed with transgressive fiction, but my recent rabbit hole has been how transgressive fiction can impact social change. I was planning an independent study course for my Creative Writing degree and discovered the book Extreme States: The Evolution of American Transgressive Fiction 1960-2000 by Coco D'Hont. Her argument is that transgressive fiction reflects society, but doesn't change it.
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