Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord

The first craft guide to the lyric essay form, this book combines hybrid craft essays that embody the key elements discussed, with more traditional craft essays that review relevant lyric theory, craft and history. An orientation to a form that is critical and creative, practical and accessible, Heidi Czerwiec centers the lyric essay on the lyre, on lyric mode, focusing on the resonances of sound, silence and image at the level of language. With topics including sound effects, imagery development, lateral movement, white space, fragmentation, using poetic craft and forms, and pedagogy, this book connects the dots between lyric theory and practice, offering the beginnings of a critical framework for a form that has been vastly undertheorized until now.

An essential guide to this exciting and popular hybrid form, Crafting the Lyric Essay will invigorate the study and writing of creative non-fiction.

Heidi Czerwiec is an essayist and poet, the author of four chapbooks, the full-length poetry collection Conjoining (2017), and of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, which was winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. She is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015). and her recent work appears in Brevity, Superstition Review, Waxwing, Assay, and River Teeth, and in the anthologies A Harp in the Stars, Nasty Women Poets and New Poetry from the Midwest. She holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and a PhD from the University of Utah, USA where she was a professor for twelve years before absconding to write and teach in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She was previouls Associate Professor at University of North Dakota, USA where she directed the Creative Writing Program and the annual UND Writers Conference.