Embracing Weirdness in Writing

One thing that I loved about Clarion was living among a quirky community of writers who were so excited about the most outlandish and random ideas, the stranger the better. Kelly Link, our first week instructor, encouraged us to embrace our weirdness. In a way that makes sense because weirdness and strangeness adds to originality of voice and story. While I thought I was capable of strange writing, I found that I am rather normal and there are a whole new world of possibilities discovered while at Clarion.

As I'm revising a Clarion story for my MFA workshop, I'm wondering about speculative elements present in mainstream literary stories. Where exactly does mainstream end and speculative begin? I suppose magic realism would be one of the borders in books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende. A few recently celebrated literary mainstream novels have significant speculative elements: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, taking place in a post-apocalyptic setting and won the Pulitzer, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, an alternate WWII historical novel which most recently won the Hugo and Nebula.

Could it be with all the craziness of Harry Potter that not only is children's and YA literature experiencing a renaissance, but speculative fiction in general?

label a novel
speculative or mainstream?
they are both fiction.