Point of View

I've been reading an anthology by Bruce Coville. It's interesting to see how his young adult/children's lit short stories from the mid 90's are different from the speculative fiction going across the Wordos critique table today. I think what I notice the most is that Coville's stories are frequently written in first person past tense ("I'll tell you what I did twenty years ago..."), which is supposedly harder to do because it kills the tension in the story (if the narrator is telling the story, chances are they're still alive). Anyway, his stories make me wonder if I couldn't press some personal boundaries by writing in a similar style -- or if Coville's narrative choice is genre specific.