The Destabilizing Potential of Hybrid Work, with Hybrid Writer and Editor Cavar

Re:View by clay scofield

Spring 2026

RE:VIEW

In Brink Re:Views, I’m excited to extend Brink’s support of hybrid forms through conversations with engaged writers, scholars, and artists. Recently I connected with writer and editor Cavar to discuss their approach to hybrid literature. I was introduced to Cavar through a workshop they facilitated through the Nashville Free Poetry Library Writer’s Gym called “Beyond Poetry and Prose,” and I wanted to learn more about their work across writing, editing, and educating. In our conversation, Cavar shares their perspectives on hybridity—that hybrid forms can be a queer approach to genre that allows freedom while posing a threat to oppressive structures.  

clay: I’d love to start with a general introduction to our readers. 

Cavar: I’m Cavar (they/them). I’m a scholar-writer-editor-educator particularly invested in trans/gender-noncompliant and Mad/disabled approaches to knowledge, craft, and politics. I have a PhD in Cultural Studies, with an emphasis in Science & Technology Studies, from UC Davis, and currently have two full-length books floating around: Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). 

I’ve done quite a bit of editorial work for venues like ANMLY, smoke + mold, and Sinister Wisdom, and currently serve on the Maine Review editorial team and as founding editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place. The latter, my mag-baby, centers and prioritizes hybrid, trans, Mad work both text-based and beyond. 

clay: What is your trajectory in creating, teaching, and publishing hybrid writing?

Cavar: I began writing stories as a young child and was pretty locked into fiction as a genre (and traditional prose as a form) until the beginning of college. At that point, I began reading poetry and hybrid work, and in so doing gained a better understanding of how and why writers used these forms to convey what prose alone could not. I guess these new creative approaches began to pour out of me, especially because it was in my first year of college that I began the first draft of what would become my debut novel, Failure to Comply. Writing Failure opened me up to the realization that I could write what I wanted, and how I wanted, and embrace the opacity that comes with using hybrid forms and genre approaches. I let myself be weird and free. At this same time, I was embracing my Mad/disabled identities, too, and this certainly helped me deliberately Madden my writing.

During college is also when I began seriously publishing my work (across genre) in literary journals. I also began publishing some chapbooks of poetry, prose, and hybrid work. In 2020, I graduated undergrad and began my PhD, which was, fortunately, housed in a Cultural Studies program that also encouraged experimentation. My pedagogical approach has flowed pretty naturally out of my approach to creativity, inasmuch as I prioritize experimentation over mastery and view the successful creative project as one which probes the boundaries of the creator’s knowing, even if some aspects “fail.” I am a perfectionist, but my writing process is one of those places where the perfectionism falls away. Mistakes, revisions, and re-(en)visioning are so integrated into the writing process that perfectionism (in writing, in teaching, in evaluating) becomes not only impossible but counterproductive. This is especially true when experimenting with genre and form. Hybrid writing frees me up to fail and learn without self-punishment.

clay: It seems like everyone has their own working definition of “hybrid” when it comes to outlining a genre. What is your attempt to define this elusive form?

What do you think is possible or necessary about forms that emerge between or beyond conventions?

Cavar: I consider hybrid work to pose a direct challenge to the questions of form and genre. I guess I view it as somewhat similar to my definition of trans identity, or queer identity: I view these not only as belonging to a nebulous “LGBTQ+ community” but rather as posing an onto-epistemological threat––a threat on the levels both of knowledge and of existence itself––to the disciplinary regimes of cisness and heterosexuality. To challenge their naturalization by any means necessary. Hybrid work is queer, is trans, in that it brings the underlying assumptions and prejudices within genre/form restrictions to light. I mean this literally: these restrictions are grounded in eurocolonial and cisheteropatriarchal notions about what poetry is, what a story is, what an essay is. Hybrid work is destabilizing, hopefully both on the textual level and on the metatextual level. To me, hybrid is a threat.

clay: You hosted a workshop in hybrid forms called “Beyond Poetry and Prose” at COOP Gallery in Nashville for the Writer’s Gym. I’m curious about your approach to facilitating space for this workshop.

Cavar: Because “hybrid” is such a nebulous category, I usually bring in several examples for students to write “after.” I did this at the Writer’s Gym: I introduced the students to three pieces written across different forms and styles and allowed those pieces to take each writer wherever they wanted to go. I find that often, reading compelling work has a pornographic quality to me. It gets me aroused and in the mood to create something myself. Sometimes, that boost of stimulation is exactly what I need to make something beautiful. I brought this principle to the workshop, giving a little bit of instruction on hybridity but leaving the majority of the time for writing. 

The last thing I’ll say is that many writers, including me, come to workshops as a kind of dedicated space to write among others. Some neurodivergent people call this productivity strategy “body doubling,” a kind of passive accountability that can be achieved by committing to work parallel to other people making the same commitment. I view each workshop as a space where people are desperately seeking a body-doubling opportunity, and plan accordingly. 

clay: What do you think is the role or importance of spaces—whether workshops or publications or anything else—for hybrid forms or in-between genres?

Cavar: Formal and genre-based boundaries are socially constructed: they were invented and continue to be relitigated by people. They don’t exist in nature, and they don’t emerge “naturally” from our impulse to make art. Supporting hybrid work means understanding that our creative practice will always defy some or all of the confines placed upon it by a given place or time or set of cultural norms. Innovation lives in these sites of defiance. As an editor, I (somewhat selfishly) want to be the one who gives a home to immensely innovative texts; I think most editors want this! When literary communities create spaces where hybrid writing thrives (and, importantly, in which ongoing editorial practices reflect a respect for hybrid/non-normative approaches to syntax, grammar, and plot), those communities benefit hugely from the courage and creativity hybrid works bring. When we embrace the weird, everyone wins.

clay: What are you looking for in writings that “don’t quite fit”? What gets you excited about any particular piece of hybrid writing?

Cavar: I am always interested in hybrid writing that is intentional—as in, you didn’t just add random line breaks to a sentence, post it on Instagram, and call it poetry. I want to see how the form and content converse, even argue. I want the choices you make in the piece to strike me as fundamentally necessary to its message. One of the biggest issues I see in what is marketed as hybrid work right now is what I could describe as pointless messiness––making unusual choices for their own sake, rather than to serve a creative purpose. These experiences are necessary as we practice our craft but aren’t suitable for publication without significant revision.

clay: What are you currently playfully obsessed with?

Cavar: Last night, I did a three-hour Wikipedia dive on ancient civilizations’ artwork. I came across several examples of cave paintings upward of 40,000 years old. These paintings do more than just depict early human activities, as well as the non-human animals they encountered. They’re also seen as some of the early markers of human cognition tantamount to that of our contemporary brains. That is to say that the capacity to make art is one of the primary sites of connection between you and I, and our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, all around the world. While it’d be easy to close my answer with some cheesiness about art “making us human” (especially in an age of AI slop), what I find even more compelling is our shared investment in representing and interpreting what we see. Today, I can look out my window and draw what I see outside. Forty thousand years ago, another human emerged from their dwelling and drew what they saw, because they knew it mattered.

clay: What’s up next for you? 

Cavar: Academically (and hybridically) I’m on submission with an autotheoretical text on what I call transMad digital communities, and particularly, the epistemological possibilities they pose for people impacted by psychiatric violence and attendant denials of autonomy. 

On the trade end, I have a bunch going on. My wonderful agent, Noah Grey Rosenzweig, and I, are on submission with my second full-length novel, which follows an anorexic fail-lesbian (said with the utmost affection) and her bestie as she deals with soap-opera tier relationship drama and a parasocial rivalry with an obnoxious recovery influencer. Also recently completed is a companion novel to Failure to Comply, set approximately 100 years prior and detailing the development of the medico-fascist entity, RSCH, whose governance in Failure is absolute. I’m also partway through a poetry collection draft, most of whose poems thus far are oriented around Judaism, intergenerational trauma, and living at the crossroads of profound Jewish historical loss while witnessing the ongoing Palestinian genocide. 

clay: What are you reading right now?

Cavar: I’m always reading at least a half-dozen books in different genres and on different subject areas. A few that I’m working my way through now include Sweet Tooth Compendium, a collected dystopian/posthuman comics anthology by Jeff Lemire; Mind of My Mind, the second Patternist novel by Octavia Butler; and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, a brutal and well-researched piece of historical nonfiction about u.s.-backed torture, terror, and ethnic cleansing in the communist Third World, particularly Indonesia.