https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/05/survival-as-a-creative-force-an-interview-with-ocean-vuong/

I’m not sure I see the tables as a useful metaphor anymore. Perhaps I worried over them then because they were provided by the culture at large. But thinking on it now, I’m not sure a genre is a destination so much as a way of thinking, a tendency of inquiry. When we think of tables, we think of staying there, of keeping our place cards, our seats. I’m not interested in possession. I want to be freer than that. Maybe I’m being naive, but I understand genres to be as fluid as genders. Our lives are full of restrictions—jobs, bills, time, gravity, all of this impinging on us—but to write is to gift yourself the freedom of choice and possibility. That feels truly precious to me. Am I still restless? Yes. I think we should always be so, always searching for a way in, a way out. I don’t want to be satisfied by what I do. But I also don’t think a career as a writer is a given—at least not for myself. I might have written my last book of poems, and now my first and last novel. And that’s okay. That’s a good life. A great life. What matters is that I got to use writing to build an architecture in which I can live and think alongside other people, other citizens of the world. If we must think in metaphoric structures, then I would rather say the novel is a town square—a space where people converge, where they’ll see these characters, see me, see each other, then go on home, perfect just as they are.