Join us for this live craft talk on Zoom with Heidi Czerwiec, essayist, poet and professor, who has written the first craft guide to the lyric essay form (Crafting the Lyric Essay, 2024). We’ll begin by defining the form and looking at what elements meld prose and poetry into the lyric essay.
We’ll discuss adapting poetic forms in writing nonfiction and review four verse forms—haiku, sonnet, sestina, and pantoum—and the kinds of content they pair well with. We’ll discuss how their formal features might be adapted to prose, and look at examples of lyric essays that have done so.
While poetry often borrows heavily from narrative prose forms (scene, anecdote, parable, joke, fairy tale), creative nonfiction doesn't often borrow poetic forms. Yet verse forms, with their ready-made scaffolding and inherent patterning, can be used either to reveal patterns in the content or to impose order on what seems like chaos. Writing in these structures can also provide what Adrienne Rich called “asbestos gloves” for handling difficult material.
Come join us! Interesting to both poets and prose writers of any experience level.
Cost: $35.
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, the lyric essay collection Fluid States, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay. She teaches and writes in Minneapolis, and is a Senior Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.
You can find Crafting the Lyric Essay on sale now at Bloomsbury Books.
