The Best of Genre + The Best of Literary Fiction = Awesome | Literary Hub

I had no patience for anything that did not meet these criteria. This narrow-mindedness extended to any creative discipline. In college, I took a class called "A History of Art and Architecture," and during the lecture on Jackson Pollock, I was fool enough to throw up my hand and ask how a bunch of splatter could be considered art. "Who's it about? Where's the story?" I said in an auditorium of several hundred students. "What distinguishes that from garbage?" At that moment I think every single one of them muttered under their breath that I was an idiot. The professor smiled at me sadly and thanked me for my opinion before changing the slide and continuing her lecture. This is one of those memories that, years later, still haunts me at odd times-when I'm driving a nighttime highway or soaping my armpits in the shower-and I cringe as if I have just bitten into tin foil.