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Where to publish your lyric essays

Since we teach a course on the lyric essay, we decided to put together a list of where to submit this hybrid form, which combines elements of essay, poetry and memoir. We looked for journals that either explicitly welcome lyric essays or that demonstrate an appreciation of the qualities that characterise the form, such as compression, attention to sound and use of poetic techniques. Almost all of the journals on our list also accept other forms of creative nonfiction, fiction and/or poetry (as highlighted below) so there’s a little something for pretty much everyone.

The list is ordered very roughly according to acceptance rate – from highest to lowest. Unless otherwise noted, these journals are OK with simultaneous submissions. If no submissions fee is noted, submissions are free (at least at the time of posting).

Note: We are a creative writing school and compile these lists for the benefit of our students. We’re happy to answer questions about our courses but please don’t send us your publishing queries or submissions :). Instead, click on the green links to go to the publication’s website and look for their submissions page. For more great places to submit as well as our best tips on getting published, check out our other lists and resources .

Bending Genres publishes creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . As their name implies, they appreciate writing that blends genres and crosses creative lines. Send in your essays of up to 1500 words. They don’t accept simultaneous submissions but they make a decision quickly – generally in less than a week.

The Spotlong Review is a new online litmag founded in 2021 with a mission to champion innovative work that “packs a punch, questions conventional mores, and, most of all, explores human connection from surprising angles”. They accept essays, narrative nonfiction, fiction and poetry with a 5000 word limit for prose. They ask for 2 months to make a decision.

Eastern Iowa Review publishes essays, fiction and poetry online plus occasional print anthologies. Their favourite forms are the lyric essay and the prose poem. They want language that sings! The editors ask for 6 months to make a decision but often respond within a week or two. They are open to fiction submissions until 15 October 2021. Their window for nonfiction and poetry just closed 31 August but check back in a few months.

JMWW is a weekly online journal publishing creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . They prefer work under 3000 words and love “flash CNF, unusual forms, and deeply personal narratives”. They generally get back very fast – in under a week.

X-R-A-Y is an online magazine of creative nonfiction and fiction . They love experimental work, preferably in their sweet spots of 500-1200 or 3000-6000 words. They ask for 60 days to make a decision but often take considerably fewer.

The Journal for Compressed Creative Arts is an online weekly dedicated to very short creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . The editors want to know what “compressed” means to you, but the prose pieces they publish are generally 600 words or fewer. Their submissions windows are 15 September – 15 December 15 & 15 March – 15 June. They pay $50 per accepted piece and generally respond very quickly – often in under a week.

Fourth Genre is a well-respected biannual print and online journal devoted to creative nonfiction. The editors are looking for works that are “lyrical, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as expository, analytical, exploratory, or whimsical”. They charge a $4 reading fee and have a single submissions window – from September through November. They generally reject within a couple of months but take longer to accept.

Birdcoat Quarterly is an online journal featuring lyric essays (up to 5000 words), poetry and original art. All work accepted is also considered for their biannual print anthology. They charge a $3 submissions fee and pay $20 per poem and $25 per essay. The editors generally respond within a couple of months.

Contrary Magazine is a quarterly online journal for creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . The nonfiction they accept “is often lyrical, narrative, or poetic”. They offer a token payment of $20 per issue. The editors ask for 90 days to make a decision – if you haven’t heard back within 90 days assume your work wasn’t a good fit.

phoebe is a 50-year old journal that has managed to stay cutting edge. They publish creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry in two issues per year – fall/winter in print and spring/summer online. They welcome lyric essays of under 4000 words, as well as other forms of creative nonfiction. Their submissions fee is $3 – you can send up to 3 flash pieces in a single submission. The editors generally make a decision within a couple of months. Note that the submission window for their fall/winter print issue closes 15 October 2021.

Salt Hill is a biannual print journal featuring top-notch creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry by established and emerging writers. For nonfiction they’re interested in work that “pushes the boundaries of the genre, making use of the techniques of fiction and poetry to tell a true story”. You can send in your essays (of up to 7500 words) year-round; they have set submissions periods for fiction and poetry. The editors aim to make a decision within 6 months and often manage in fewer.

Gulf Coast is a biannual print journal of creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . It was founded by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate in 1986. Their word limit for prose is 7000 words. They charge a $3 submissions fee and pay $50 per page for accepted work. The editors ask for 6 months to make a decision and often succeed in considerably fewer.

Pank , co-founded by Roxane Gay, publishes online quarterly and in print annually. They accept fiction and poetry as well as creative nonfiction and are looking for fresh, innovative work of up to 7500 words. They offer limited windows for free submissions but the “tip jar” option ($5) is usually open. The editors tend to accept relatively fast – within a couple of months – and reject more slowly.

Brevity is a long-running online magazine devoted to the short-form essay – 750 words or fewer. The editors pride themselves on the magazine’s international scope and for offering opportunities to as yet unpublished writers. The editors are looking for the best of the best – and regularly publish heavy-hitters such as Roxane Gay and Sherman Alexie. Payment is $45 for accepted essays. They generally respond within 2 or 3 months.

Creative Nonfiction publishes true stories in many forms – everything from immersion reportage to personal essay to memoir – quarterly in print. They solicit work from established writers but also have regular calls for unsolicited submissions aimed at specific groups (e.g., writers over 60), subjects and types of CNF. Non-subscribers are charged a $3 reading fee. Be prepared for a long wait – response times of over a year are common.

Hippocampus exclusively publishes creative nonfiction. They are looking for flash (up to 800 words), personal essays and memoir excerpts (up to 4,000 words) for their 6 online issues per year. There are 2 regular submission windows (submissions fee $3): March through May and September through November, plus a submission-fee free period from December 1 through 23. They pay $40 per piece accepted. They aim to make a decision within 4 months but often take considerably longer.

Seneca Review is a biannual print poetry journal published by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. They have been promoting the lyric essay since 1997. They have two reading periods 1 February – 15 March and 1 September through 15 October. There’s a $3 charge for electronic submissions (submissions sent by post are free). Send in your lyric essays of up to 20 pages (around 5000 words) or 3 – 5 poems, just be prepared to wait a while for a response – they ask for 9 months to make a decision and sometimes take even longer.

5 responses on "Where to publish your lyric essays"

We want to read your stories!

I am establishing a micro-publishers called goatshedpress. We are going to be publishing high-quality, cutting edge chapbooks of collected writing. I would love to read your short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Contributors will receive free copies to sell/distribute, and an author bio both in the chapbook and on our website (still in development).

Email your writing to [email protected] and I will try my best to get back to you in under two weeks. Look forward to reading your work!

Can you put some free ones on here? Object to paying reading fees when I can’t buy frucerues with my words!

Groceries, I mean!

I personally appreciate your curating both online and print journals for us. Further, being a seasoned senior, you are compassionate as for limited resources, while at the same time knowing excellence has no age limit or careers targeted. Please continue to value input from those who can well add historical contexts to modern essays and poetry. For example, Millenials and Z Generation may gain valuable insights and wisdom from experience of older (nevertheless unpublished and unknown) fellow human beings. Memento Mori — we are mortal!

Really great list. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

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In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark.

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.”

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
An unobstructed flow of ideas.
Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly .

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

Writing From the Margins: On the Origins and Development of the Lyric Essay

Zoë bossiere and erica trabold consider essay writing as resistance.

Once, the lyric essay did not have a name.

Or, it was called by many names. More a quality of writing than a category, the form lived for centuries in the private zuihitsu journals of Japanese court ladies, the melodic folktales told by marketplace troubadours, and the subversive prose poems penned by the European romantics.

Before I came to lyric essays, I came to writing. When my teacher asked the class to write a story for homework , I couldn’t believe my luck. But in response to my first attempt, she wrote in the margins: this is cliché .

As a first-generation college student, I was afraid I didn’t know how to tell a story properly, that my mind didn’t work that way. That I didn’t belong in a college classroom, wasn’t a real writer.

And yet, language pulled me. Alone in my dorm room, I arranged and rearranged words, whispered them aloud until the cadences pleased me, their smooth sounds like prayers. I had no name for what I was writing then, but it felt like a style I could call my own.

While the origins of the lyric essay predate its naming, the most well-known attempt to categorize the form came in 1997, when writers John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, coeditors of Seneca Review , noticed a “new” genre in the submission queue—not quite poetry, but neither quite narrative.

This form-between-forms seemed to ignore the conventions of prose writing—such as a linear chronology, narrative, and plot—in favor of embracing more liminal styles, moving by association rather than story, dancing around unspoken truths, devolving into a swirling series of digressions.

D’Agata and Tall’s proposed term for this kind of writing, “the lyric essay,” stuck, and in the ensuing decade the word would be adopted by many essayists to describe the kind of writing they do.

As a genderfluid writer and as a writing teacher, I’ve always appreciated the lyric essay as a literary beacon amid turbulent narrative waves. A means to cast light on negative space, to illuminate subjects that defy the conventions of traditional essay writing.

Introducing this writing style to students is among my favorite course units. Semester after semester, the students most drawn to the lyric essay tend to be those who enter the classroom from the margins, whose perspectives are least likely to be included on course reading lists.

Since its naming, the lyric essay has existed in an almost paradoxical space, at once celebrated for its unique characteristics while also relegated to the margins of creative nonfiction. Perhaps because of this contradiction, much of the conversation about the lyric essay—the definition of what it is and does, where it fits on the spectrum of nonfiction and poetry, whether it has a place in literary journals and in the creative writing classroom—remains unsettled, extending into the present.

I thought getting accepted into a graduate program meant I had finally opened the gilded, solid oak doors of academia—a place no one in my family, not a parent, an aunt or uncle, a sibling or cousin, had ever seen the other side of.

But at my cohort’s first meeting in a state a thousand miles from home, I understood I was still on the outside of something.

“Are you sure you write lyric essays?” the other writers asked. “What does that even mean?”

The acceptance of the lyric form seems to depend largely on who is writing it. The essays that tend to thrive in dominant-culture spaces like academia and publishing are often written by writers who already occupy those spaces. This may be part of why, despite its expansive nature, many of the most widely-anthologized, widely-read, and widely-taught lyric essays represent a narrow range of perspectives: most often, those of the center.

To name the lyric essay—to name anything—is to construct rules about what an essay called “lyric” should look like on the page, should examine in its prose, even who it should be written by. But this categorization has its uses, too.

Much like when a person openly identifies as queer , identifying an essayistic style as “lyric” provides a blueprint for others on the margins to name their experiences—a form through which to speak their truths.

The center is, by definition, a limited perspective, capable of viewing only itself.

In “Marginality as a Site of Resistance,” bell hooks positions the margins not as a state “one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays on, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.”

To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.

I graduated with a manuscript of lyric essays, one that coalesced into my first book. That book went on to win a prize judged by John D’Agata and named for Deborah Tall. I had finally found my footing, unlocked that proverbial door. But skepticism followed me in.

On my book tour, I was invited to read at my alma mater alongside another writer whose nonfiction tackled pressing social issues with urgency, empathy, and wit. I read an essay about home and friendship, about being young and the hard lessons of growing up.

After the reading, we fielded a Q&A. The Dean of my former college raised his hand.

“I can see what work the other writer is doing quite clearly,” he said to me. “But what exactly is the point of yours?”

Writing is never a neutral act. Although a rallying slogan from a different era and cause, the maxim “the personal is political” still applies to the important work writers do when they speak truth to power, call attention to injustice, and advocate for social change.

Because the lyric essay is fluid, able to occupy both marginal and center spaces, it is a form uniquely suited to telling stories on the writer’s terms, without losing sight of where the writer comes from, and the audiences they are writing toward.

When we tell the stories of our lives—especially when those stories challenge assumptions about who we are—it is an act of resistance.

Many of the contemporary LGBTQIA+ essayists I teach in my classes write lyrical prose to capture queer experience on the page. Their works reckon with nonbinary family building and parenthood, the ghosts of trans Midwestern origin, coming of age in a queer Black body, the over- whelming epidemic of transmisogyny and gendered violence.

The lyric essay is an ideal container for these stories, each a unique prism reflecting the ambiguous, messy, and ever-evolving processes through which we as queer people come to understand ourselves.

Lyric essays rarely stop to provide directions, instead mapping the reader on a journey into the writer’s world, toward an unknown end. Along the way, the reader learns to interpret the signs, begins to understand that the road blocks and potholes and detours—those gaps, the words left unspoken on the page—are as important as the essay’s destination.

The lyric essays that have taught me the most as a writer never showed their full hand. Each became its own puzzle, with secrets to unlock. When the text on a page was obscured, the essay taught me to fill in the blanks. When the conflict didn’t resolve, I realized irresolution might be its truest end. When the segments of the essay seemed unconnected, I learned to read between the lines.

The most powerful lyric essays reclaim silence from the silencers, becoming a space of agency for writers whose experiences are routinely questioned, flattened, or appropriated.

Readers from the margins, those who have themselves been silenced, recognize the game.

The twenty contemporary lyric essays in this volume embody resistance through content, style, design, and form, representing of a broad spectrum of experiences that illustrate how identities can intersect, conflict, and even resist one another. Together, they provide a dynamic example of the lyric essay’s range of expression while showcasing some of the most visionary contemporary essayists writing in the form today.

__________________________________

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Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold

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A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

Poets can learn a lot from blurring genres. Whether getting inspiration from fiction proves effective in building characters or song-writing provides a musical tone, poetry intersects with a broader literary landscape. This shines through especially in lyric essays, a form that has inspired articles from the Poetry Foundation and Purdue Writing Lab , as well as become the concept for a 2015 anthology titled We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay.

Put simply, the lyric essay is a hybrid, creative nonfiction form that combines the rich figurative language of poetry with the longer-form analysis and narrative of essay or memoir. Oftentimes, it emerges as a way to explore a big-picture idea with both imagery and rigor. These four examples provide an introduction to the writing style, as well as spotlight tips for creating your own.

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker . It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” This first line not only immediately propels the reader into Zauner’s grief, but it also reveals an example of the popular “braided essay” technique, which weaves together two distinct but somehow related experiences.

Throughout the work, Zauner establishes a parallel between her and her mother’s relationship and traditional Korean food. “You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup,” Zauner writes, illuminating the deeply personal and mystifying experience of grieving through direct, sensory imagery.

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

Lyric essays blend poetic qualities and nonfiction qualities. Hadara Bar-Nadav illustrates this experimental nature in Selections from Babyland , a multi-part lyric essay that delves into experiences with infertility. Though Bar-Nadav’s writing throughout this piece showcases rhythmic anaphora—a definite poetic skill—it also plays with nonfiction forms not typically seen in poetry, including bullet points and a multiple-choice list.

For example, when recounting unsolicited advice from others, Bar-Nadav presents their dialogue in the following way:

I heard about this great _____________.

a. acupuncturist

b. chiropractor

d. shamanic healer

e. orthodontist ( can straighter teeth really make me pregnant ?)

This unexpected visual approach feels reminiscent of an article or quiz—both popular nonfiction forms—and adds dimension and white space to the lyric essay.

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych , and her work has also appeared in an anthology of the best flash nonfiction. Her essay “Some Sort of Union,” published in Hippocampus Magazine , was a finalist in the magazine’s Best Creative Nonfiction contest.

Since lyric essays are typically longer and more free verse than poems, they can be a way to address a larger idea or broader time period. Boutsikaris does this in “Some Sort of Union,” where the speaker drifts from an interaction with a romantic interest to her childhood.

“They were neighbors, the girl and the air force paramedic. She could have seen his front door from her high-rise window if her window faced west rather than east,” Boutsikaris describes. “When she first met him two weeks ago, she’d been wearing all white, buying a wedge of cheap brie at the corner market.”

In the very next paragraph, Boutskiras shifts this perspective and timeline, writing, “The girl’s mother had been angry with her when she was a child. She had needed something from the girl that the girl did not know how to give. Not the way her mother hoped she would.”

As this example reveals, examining different perspectives and timelines within a lyric essay can flesh out a broader understanding of who a character is.

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

Like any other form of writing, lyric essays benefit from in-depth research. And while journalistic or scientific details can sometimes throw off the concise ecosystem and syntax of a poem, the lyric essay has room for this sprawling information.

In “What Fullness Is,” award-winning writer Roxane Gay contextualizes her own ideas and experiences with weight loss surgery through the history and culture surrounding the procedure.

“The first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain,” Gay details. “He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was taken to Córdoba, where a doctor sewed his lips shut. Only able to drink through a straw, the former king lost enough weight after a time to return home and reclaim his kingdom.”

“The notion that thinness—and the attempt to force the fat body toward a state of culturally mandated discipline—begets great rewards is centuries old.”

Researching and knowing this history empowers Gay to make a strong central point in her essay.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of the techniques above to emulate in your own take on the lyric essay. Happy writing!

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On the Seawall a community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Submit your work.

We warmly welcome your submission of original or translated writing: poetry, short story and flash fiction, conventional and lyric essay, cross-genre writing, text and image. We also publish photo essays.

Editors are people who help writers improve their work for publication. The literary world is dense with publishers, not editors. We may offer suggestions. PLEASE NOTE: If you don’t want to receive unsolicited notes/suggestions on your work, please tell us when you submit. We like to work with our authors and continue to support their work over time. If you’re mainly interested in piling up “acceptances,” consider going elsewhere.

You may email your work, attached as a Word doc, to Ron Slate at seawallsubmissions[at]gmail[dot]com . Poetry: 3-6 poems. Flash prose (essay, memoir, fiction), send 3-5 pieces. Longer prose, no specific length requirements. Include a few lines of autobiographia in your email message.

Response time is fast, usually within a month. This is why simultaneous submissions are OK — we’ll probably respond before they do. No one should have to wait 6-9 months for an editor to put down their phone and read their submissions.

If you are interested in writing commentary and reviews, please contact us first and indicate what you have in mind. We publish reviews of titles across the arts and humanities, from independent, university and corporate publishers. We have drawn up a set of guidelines to help you get started.

If you send us work, you agree to have your name and email address added to our list. You can always remove it later.

Course Syllabus

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play

Experiment with form and explore the possibilities of this flexible genre..

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Each week provides:

discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for instructor and/or peer review
additional optional writing exercises
an optional video conference that is open to all students(and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

Week 2: Experiments with Form: Braided Essay and Hermit Crab Essay

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

Week 3: Lyric Vignette and the Prose Poem

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

Week 4: Witnessing the Self: Essays by Poets

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

Week 5: Hybrid Forms and the Documentary Impulse

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, Roz Chast and Maira Kalman for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Essays come in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms: they can be the five paragraph essays you wrote in school — maybe for or against gun control or on symbolism in The Great Gatsby . Essays can be personal narratives or argumentative pieces that appear on blogs or as newspaper editorials. They can be funny takes on modern life or works of literary criticism. They can even be book-length instead of short. Essays can be so many things!

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “lyric essay” and are wondering what that means. I’m here to help.

What is the Lyric Essay?

A quick definition of the term “lyric essay” is that it’s a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem.

Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it’s simply that in poetry the line breaks matter, and in prose they don’t. That’s it! So the lyric essay is prose, meaning where the line breaks fall doesn’t matter, but it has other similarities to what you find in poems.

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Lyric essays have what we call “poetic” prose. This kind of prose draws attention to its own use of language. Lyric essays set out to create certain effects with words, often, although not necessarily, aiming to create beauty. They are often condensed in the way poetry is, communicating depth and complexity in few words. Chances are, you will take your time reading them, to fully absorb what they are trying to say. They may be more suggestive than argumentative and communicate multiple meanings, maybe even contradictory ones.

Lyric essays often have lots of white space on their pages, as poems do. Sometimes they use the space of the page in creative ways, arranging chunks of text differently than regular paragraphs, or using only part of the page, for example. They sometimes include photos, drawings, documents, or other images to add to (or have some other relationship to) the meaning of the words.

Lyric essays can be about any subject. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. They can be philosophical or about nature or history or culture, or any combination of these things. What distinguishes them from other essays, which can also be about any subject, is their heightened attention to language. Also, they tend to deemphasize argument and carefully-researched explanations of the kind you find in expository essays . Lyric essays can argue and use research, but they are more likely to explore and suggest than explain and defend.

Now, you may be familiar with the term “ prose poem .” Even if you’re not, the term “prose poem” might sound exactly like what I’m describing here: a mix of poetry and prose. Prose poems are poetic pieces of writing without line breaks. So what is the difference between the lyric essay and the prose poem?

Honestly, I’m not sure. You could call some pieces of writing either term and both would be accurate. My sense, though, is that if you put prose and poetry on a continuum, with prose on one end and poetry on the other, and with prose poetry and the lyric essay somewhere in the middle, the prose poem would be closer to the poetry side and the lyric essay closer to the prose side.

Some pieces of writing just defy categorization, however. In the end, I think it’s best to call a work what the author wants it to be called, if it’s possible to determine what that is. If not, take your best guess.

Four Examples of the Lyric Essay

Below are some examples of my favorite lyric essays. The best way to learn about a genre is to read in it, after all, so consider giving one of these books a try!

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine cover

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen counts as a lyric essay, but I want to highlight her lesser-known 2004 work. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence from the perspective of post-9/11 America. It combines words and images, particularly television images, to ponder our relationship to media and culture. Rankine writes in short sections, surrounded by lots of white space, that are personal, meditative, beautiful, and achingly sad.

Calamities by Renee Gladman

Calamities is a collection of lyric essays exploring language, imagination, and the writing life. All of the pieces, up until the last 14, open with “I began the day…” and then describe what she is thinking and experiencing as a writer, teacher, thinker, and person in the world. Many of the essays are straightforward, while some become dreamlike and poetic. The last 14 essays are the “calamities” of the title. Together, the essays capture the artistic mind at work, processing experience and slowly turning it into writing.

The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

The Self Unstable is a collection of short essays — or are they prose poems? — each about the length of a paragraph, one per page. Gabbert’s sentences read like aphorisms. They are short and declarative, and part of the fun of the book is thinking about how the ideas fit together. The essays are divided into sections with titles such as “The Self is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” The book is sharp, surprising, and delightful.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. Maggie Nelson’s subjects are many and include the color blue, in which she finds so much interest and meaning it will take your breath away. It’s also about suffering: she writes about a friend who became a quadriplegic after an accident, and she tells about her heartbreak after a difficult break-up. Bluets is meditative and philosophical, vulnerable and personal. It’s gorgeous, a book lovers of The Argonauts shouldn’t miss.

It’s probably no surprise that all of these books are published by small presses. Lyric essays are weird and genre-defying enough that the big publishers generally avoid them. This is just one more reason, among many, to read small presses!

If you’re looking for more essay recommendations, check out our list of 100 must-read essay collections and these 25 great essays you can read online for free .

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Submitting to Literary Magazines

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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OVERVIEW

This section of the OWL seeks to demystify the process of submitting creative work to literary magazines. We’ll review topics such as how to figure out what to submit in the first place, how to find good potential homes for your work, and how to maximize your chances for acceptance. We’ve also included examples of writing relevant to the submission process such a cover letter and a biography as well as an acceptance and rejection letter to provide a look into what correspondence with literary magazines looks like.

INTRODUCTION

You’ve done it! Whether it was a lightning bolt of inspiration or weeks (months? years?) of writing and revising, you’ve crafted a piece of creative writing you’re proud of. Maybe it’s a sestina; maybe it’s a lyric essay. Whatever it is, you want to get it published. Reasons for publication are numerous: wanting to see what others think of your work, seeking a way to bulk up your CV, or hoping for a chance to get some hard-earned cash, just to name a few. Regardless of if you’ve submitted 100 times before or this is your first time, this resource will help you navigate the submission process.

We’ll start by thinking through what you can submit in the first place. Next, we’ll move into thinking about where to submit, considering strategies for finding places to submit in the first place as well as how to discern whether or not a particular publication is a good fit for your work. After, we’ll think through the logistics of how to submit and talk through an example cover letter and biography (written materials you’ll almost certainly be asked to include in your submission). Finally, we’ll discuss what happens after you submit and review a few example rejection letters as well as an example acceptance letter.

WHAT DO I SUBMIT?

There are three main considerations when discerning what to submit: 1) whether or not a piece has already been published, 2) the genre of a piece, and 3) the length of a piece.

First, if a piece has already been published, including on a personal blog, a website, and/or on social media, your piece is almost always not eligible for re-publication. The same goes for work that has already been self-published. Lit mags (also referred to throughout this document as literary magazines, literary journals, and journals) want to be the first to feature your work in question and not just “another place” that offers your work a home.

Second, different lit mags accept different genres. For example, if you only write short stories, you won’t be able to publish in Rattle , which only publishes poetry. If you write in multiple different genres, you might find that you are able to submit your fiction to one magazine, and your essays to another.

Third, lit mags often have length restrictions, which can vary widely. You might be able to submit poems only if they are 50 lines or less; or, you might be able to submit any type of prose so long as it is 6,000 words or less. If you tend to write particularly long pieces but want to submit to a lit mag that has length restrictions, try finding an excerpt of a larger work to submit or condensing your work for the sake of submitting it.

WHERE DO I SUBMIT?

After deciding to submit what work to submit, one question often looms: Where do I submit? Finding lit mags is just a Google search away. Chances are, you’ve heard of some flagship publications: The New Yorker , Paris Review , Ploughshares …. Just as there are myriads of different types of writing in the world, so too are there myriads of different kinds of lit mags. Some have been around for decades; some were founded earlier this year. Some only publish online; some only publish hard copy. Some are themed (nature poems only, zombie fiction only, Wyoming-themed work, etc.). Some operate through universities; others are independent. Some require payment to have your work read (usually a smallish fee, say, $3) whereas others allow you to submit for free. Some pay their contributors, though most don’t, or do only minimally. Some ask you to submit your work through Submittable (an online submissions-management platform) whereas a select few ask for hard copy submissions mailed to their office. (For more on this front, “How do I submit?” is a good place to start.) Seeking the right home for your work can be intimidating, but it’s not an impossible task. Below are four strategies to help you find places to submit to in the first place.

1. This list from Driftwood Press: a good starting point!

If you don’t know where to start, Driftwood Press keeps a massive “Where Else to Submit” list, linked above, that includes links to hundreds of different magazines and presses, what genres they accept, when their submission deadlines are, whether or not there is a submission fee, and whether or not they offer compensation for publication.

The enormity of the list can be overwhelming, but you can always select a few lit mags on this list at random and begin scanning their websites to see what their publication is all about as you consider whether your work might find a good home there.

2. What writers do you like? Where did they publish?

Do you have a favorite author? Favorite poet? Take a look at a book of theirs and see where they’ve published. This is especially relevant for books of poetry, essays, short stories, or other work often published as a collection. Just like musical artists often release a few singles before their album, it is commonplace for a writer to have portions of their work published in lit mags before putting out a book-length collection.

In other words, if you like Writer X’s work, maybe you’ll like where she publishes, too! If you are reading contemporary work, it’s helpful simply to read the “Acknowledgements” pages and slowly get familiar with the names of different lit mags.

3. Look local.

If you are a Purdue student, maybe you’ve grown particularly fond of the cornfields in Indiana, and publishing work through a local journal is particularly appealing to you. If so, maybe you’d be especially drawn to the Sycamore Review , The Indianapolis Review , or any number of other journals based out of Indiana. To find local lit mags or publishers, a good start would be to visit a bookstore or library in your area and browse their shelves to see what lit mags they’re carrying.

4. Consider submission windows.

A vast majority of literary magazines do not accept submissions year-round; rather, they may have a “submission window” where they accept work. Some magazines only accept work one month of the year, whereas others may have two different three-month submission periods during the calendar year. Some magazines might have a month-long submission window (June 15-July 15, for example) that will automatically close once they reach a certain number of submissions. If, for instance, you only have time to commit to submitting your creative writing in the summer months, you’ll want to find magazines that accept submissions in the summertime. As you begin the process of finding lit mags you like and want to publish in, it might help to make a document to organize when you can submit to which magazine.

HOW DO I KNOW IF MY WORK IS A GOOD FIT?

Below are three considerations to help you gauge if your work seems like it could be a good fit for the journal you’ve found.

1. Read the most recent issue.

This is arguably the most time-consuming (and perhaps frustratingly obvious) tip, but it has to go first. Just like the best way to figure out if you like a restaurant is to try its food, the best way to figure out if you want to submit to a lit mag is to give it a read. If paying the $10 or $15 dollars necessary to order the lit mag (or pay for online access to it) isn’t possible or doesn’t appeal, fear not! There is often online content for your perusal. Most, though not all, lit mags have online features, so while you may not be able to read the most recent issue in its entirety, you can still read work that the magazine’s editors deemed fit for publication. Even if a lit mag doesn’t publish any of their work online (or a paywall prevents you from accessing it), lit mags that offer contests will often publish contest winners.

2. Read the “About Us.”

Beyond growing familiar with work the lit mag publishes, check out the “About Us” page. This will often include the mission statement / vision for the journal, which can also be helpful in discerning if there might be aesthetic similarities and/or shared interested between you and the folks who run the journal. Further, it can be great to look into who runs the lit mag. If you’re sending in a short story, who is the fiction editor? Look that person up—maybe even read a short story published by the editor. Does this person seem like they might be interested in the kind of work you create?

3. If you are in touch with other writers, use them as resources!

Not everyone is in the position of having other writers nearby, but if you are in touch with other writers and/or know of writers who have publishing experience, feel free to ask them if they have any experience with the journal you have in mind. Maybe they won’t, but maybe they will—or know someone who does. (Consider this is a broader encouragement, too, to seek out community as you seek readers for your work.)

WILL MY WORK BE ACCEPTED?

It’s important to make a few concessions, here.

Concession Number One: There are many more writers than there are literary magazines, journals, and publishers.

Concession Number Two: Except for the most widely renowned writers (think, those who have entire bookcases devoted to them at big-name bookstores), creative writing is not a lucrative field, and likely will not become one.

These two concessions combine for Concession Number Three: Readers and editors for literary magazines are swimming in submissions. It’s not unreasonable for a magazine to receive 700 short story submissions and only be able to publish five of them, or to receive 200 poetry submissions and only be able to publish eight.

Space within magazines, especially print ones, is at a premium; the time of the person reading your submission is at a premium, too. It is actually a great sign of encouragement when, in response to your submission, you receive what’s known as a personalized rejection rather than a form rejection. That is, you might receive a note informing you that, while the journal cannot publish your work at this time, they enjoyed reading it and would love to hear more from you in the future. (Read more below on I submitted: Now what?)

So, will your work be accepted? Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely. But, it’s also unlikely for an NFL team to win a Super Bowl, or a scientist to win a Nobel Prize, or a student to get admitted into Harvard, but these things happen every single year. If publishing is something important to you, don’t let the odds stop you from trying.

WHAT CAN I DO TO MAXIMIZE MY CHANCES OF BEING PUBLISHED?

While publication percentages may not be particularly confidence-inspiring, there are things you can do to increase the chance your work will get picked up.

1. Submit your best work.

This is perhaps obvious, but it bears noting. As discussed above, readers for lit mags are often inundated with submissions. Submit your best work first to help yourself stand out. If you’re unsure which is “best,” ask a trusted reader for their opinion. Further, if you are submitting a packet (two different flash fiction pieces, or five pomes) rather than an individual work, start with the strongest.

2. Read the submission guidelines!

For better or worse, lit mag readers and editors are almost always looking for ways to easily shrink their stack of 1,000 submissions, to, say, 100. And then to 10. There is no easier way to get your submission denied than by neglecting to follow every submission guideline. This means that you should not submit four poems when the magazine only accepts three, submit a PDF when the magazine asks for a Word doc, or submit your fiction to the nonfiction category. Similarly, do not send in a 2,500-word essay when the journal asks for a 2,400-word maximum.

Follow all submission guidelines exactly, not because it is so important to, say, have your bio in third-person as opposed to first-person, but because following these guidelines will allow the reader to immediately dive into the important material—your work—without getting bogged down by any logistical hiccups. Further, adhering to the submission guidelines shows that you yourself are a careful reader and that you respect the journal by following said guidelines in the first place.

3. Make sure your work is a good fit in the first place!

Revisit “How do I know if my work is a good fit?” above.

4. Consider simultaneous submissions.

Most journals accept simultaneous submissions, which is, as the term suggests, submitting your work story to multiple different journals simultaneously. Most journals will clarify in their guidelines whether or not they accept simultaneous submissions (a vast majority do, so long as you let Journal B know that your piece is no longer available as soon as Journal A accepts it .) If there’s a short story you really want in the world, consider sending it to a handful, maybe even two handfuls, of places.

CONTESTS VS. GENERAL SUBMISSIONS

Another consideration for submissions is whether you’d prefer to submit to magazine’s general submissions, their contests, or a mix of both. Contests, offered by some—not all—journals, are generally more competitive and more expensive to enter (fees usually range between $20-$30). But, winning them almost always comes with clout as well as prize money, ranging from modest sums ($100) to larger ones ($1,000+). Sometimes, contest winners are selected by a guest judge (generally a respected and perhaps well-known writer), and other times they are chosen by the editors of the magazine themselves.

One thing to note is that even if you don’t win the contest, it can be possible to still be picked up for publication by the journal as a finalist or simply as someone who caught the attention of the judges. Whether or not finalists and/or semifinalists are published alongside the contest winner (or winners) is up to the magazine’s discretion.

HOW DO I SUBMIT?

On the websites of most journals, there will most likely be a tab that says “Submit” or “Submissions.” Occasionally, this tab is slightly buried somewhere on the webpage. (Look in the “About Us” or “Contact Us” sections of the site if you have trouble finding it.)

In terms of actually submitting, a vast majority of journals only accept—or greatly prefer—online submissions. Generally, this is done via a platform called Submittable that allows you (as the submitter) to manage and track your submissions, just as it allows the journal editors to track and view their submissions. Sometimes, submitting is done via an in-house submission portal, and, in the rarest of circumstances, a magazine will only accept mailed, hard copy submissions. Regardless, the lit mag will (or should ) have their submissions process clearly demarcated on their website in terms of 1) how to submit, 2) what time(s) of year they accept submissions, and 3) what they are looking for in terms of submissions (genre, page length, etc.).

As noted previously, following these submission guidelines exactly is in your best interest. Beyond preparing your piece of writing for submission and figuring out the journal’s guidelines so you can follow them, there are two other pieces to the submission puzzle you’ll need: a strong cover letter and a solid, succinct bio.

COVER LETTER + EXAMPLE

The cover letter is your chance to briefly let the journal know 1) what you are submitting as well as 2) why you are submitting to that magazine in particular. The best-case scenario for a cover letter is that you’ve presented yourself in a professional manner as an eager, capable writer with a strong reason for submitting to the journal. What follows is an example cover letter:

Dear Audrey Li and the entire Coffee Journal team,

Please consider my following poems, “Exciting Poem 1,” “Clever Poem 2,” and “Memorable Poem 3” for inclusion within an upcoming edition of Coffee Journal . I especially admired Ash Lever’s “Brilliantly Titled Poem” in your latest edition and would be honored for my work to be considered for publication in an upcoming edition of your journal.

This is a simultaneous submission, and I will let you know immediately if any of these poems are accepted elsewhere.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my work.

Best,

It’s helpful to make a few quick notes on this example cover letter and what this writer does well. She…

Addresses, by name, the relevant genre editor to whom she has addressed the cover letter.
Includes the name of the work she is submitting, as well as the professional, polite request to consider her work in an upcoming edition of the journal.
Mentions something she specifically admires about the journal in question, revealing herself as someone who has “done her homework”—that is, she is showing that she really does have (at least some) vested interest in this magazine.
Notes that her submission is simultaneous; that is, she is submitting these poems to other magazines as well. As previously noted, this is fine to do if the magazine accepts simultaneous submissions so long as she lets Coffee Journal know that one (or more) of her poems is no longer available as soon as she learned another journal has accepted them.
Concludes the note by thanking the editor(s). Remember, these cover letters are being read by readers who are often underpaid or unpaid and who have, more often than not, dozens and dozens of pieces to read. Kindness in a cover letter is important here just as it is elsewhere.

For more, The Adroit Journal has a great piece further explaining the ins and outs of cover letter writing with an annotated example.

BIOGRAPHY + EXAMPLE

The biography is your chance to briefly give a glimpse of who your writer-self is. Common information to include is where you are from, where you went to or are going to school, what you do for work, and where you have been previously published (if applicable). Writing in third person is the best way to go.

Generally, these are expected to be professional. That said, if the journal you are applying to is particularly quirky, or you have no desire to confine yourself to the constraints of a traditional cover letter, feel free to be quirky. The best-case scenario for a biography is that, similarly to the cover letter, you’ve presented yourself as a professional and given the magazine a small glimpse of who you are.

For those of you asking, “What do I put for publications if I haven’t published anywhere yet?” the answer is simple: nothing. Don’t let your lack of publishing be a catch-22 stopping you from trying to publish in the first place. And take heart: Many magazines exist specifically with the mission to promote new and emerging writers.

What follows is an example biography:

A. Writer is a poet from Indiana. She received her MFA in poetry from A Super Excellent University, and her poems have appeared in This Cool Journal and are forthcoming from Another Cool Journal . She lives in West Lafayette where she teaches high school English.

I SUBMITTED! NOW WHAT?

Congratulations! Even if your work is not selected by the particular lit mag you submitted to, you are putting your work out in the world. At this point, you wait. Response times vary widely, from several weeks to up to a year (or more). Many magazines have submission guidelines indicating about how long you should expect to wait to hear back. Some will also ask that they not be contacted with an inquiry about your submission until a certain amount of time has passed.

During the waiting process, don’t let your writing life be put on hold! A common saying in the journalistic field applies here: “Work is never finished, it just meets deadline.” Feel free to continue shaping the writing projects you submitted, or leave them until you hear back from journals and allow yourself to start writing in new directions.

REJECTION LETTERS: TWO TYPES + EXAMPLES

Generally speaking, there are two different types of rejection letters a lit mag can give, and—perhaps surprisingly—one of these is actually good news. The first type is a form rejection letter. This is a generic rejection, meaning this letter is copy and pasted to each person who receives it (with the exception of changing the submitter’s name and the title of their submitted work). A form rejection might look like this:

Dear A. Writer,

Thank you for submitting “Exciting Poem 1,” “Clever Poem 2,” and “Memorable Poem 3” to Coffee Journal . Unfortunately, we decided your work was not a fit for us at this time.

Sincerely,

The Editors

A personalized rejection, on the other hand, while still a rejection, often includes some kind of encouragement. Two different examples, followed by an explanation of why a personalized rejection is good news, follows:

Thank you for submitting “Exciting Poem 1,” “Clever Poem 2,” and “Memorable Poem 3” to Coffee Journal . While we are not able to find a place for it at this time, we found your work exciting and greatly enjoyed reading it. We would look forward to reading more of your writing in the future.

Thank you for submitting to Coffee Journal . Though we have decided against publishing your work at this time, we found “Clever Poem 2” particularly moving. Please keep up in mind for future work.

On the outset, the form rejection letter and the personalized rejection letters don’t have much of a difference. But take heart: That extra line in the personalized rejection letters is a big deal. Anything such as an invitation to resubmit, a specific, encouraging note about your work, and / or commentary about your specific pieces or writing are signs your rejection was personalized rather than a form rejection. This means that out of the large amount of work that journal received, while your work wasn’t part of the teeny percentage chosen for publication, it stood out to the editors. It’s not a bad idea to consider submitting again a future reading period for that lit mag; if you do so, consider adding a note in your cover letter that you’ve been encouraged to resubmit.

DEALING WITH REJECTION

In an interview with Michigan Quarterly Review , poet Hannah Ensor spoke well on creative writing awards (and, perhaps by extension, publication): “I think that it means a lot when you do win, but it means almost nothing when you don’t.”

In a world where editors and readers for lit mags are swimming in submissions, a rejection is not so much a condemnation of your work as a “out of the 100 pieces we received, this is not one of the five we are able to accept.” This isn’t to say that rejection doesn’t sting; no one likes getting turned down. For better or worse, rejection is simply part of the process.

Further, being rejected from a particular journal is not necessarily a suggestion that your work isn’t a good fit for the journal; much is up to chance in terms of who first reads your work. Many lit mags, especially larger ones, have teams of readers that will curate a small portion of submissions for more serious consideration by the section or genre editor(s). Your submission to Coffee Journal this year may be read by a completely different set of eyes than last year.

Finally, consider the following positive spins on rejection:

Rejection is an invitation to keep writing.

On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to return to your work: What might be revised? How might you make your work come more fully into its own? On the other hand, it can be an opportunity to dive into something new, with all the knowledge and experience you’ve now gained from writing what you’ve already written. (If having writing that never gets published is a depressing thought, consider this encouragement by accomplished writer Anne Lamott in an essay of hers embracing the messiness of first drafts: “Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go – but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”)

Rejection is an opportunity to revisit why you write in the first place.

Why did you write that story, that poem, that essay in the first place? Rejection can provide a tangible time to revisit your “Why?” as a writer. If you’re writing for the money and you’ve gotten numerous rejections from paid awards, perhaps writing is not the most prudent path forward. If you’re writing because you feel you have something to say, because you love language, because it’s a way for you to discover what you’re thinking and how you feel about the world, well…rejection can’t touch those motivations. Remind yourself why you got into writing in the first place and keep at it.

ACCEPTANCE LETTERS: YOU’RE IN! WHAT’S NEXT?

The purpose of acceptance letters is simple. You’re in! Like a job offer, an acceptance letter from a lit mag means you have an offer for publication—they want you if you want them. After your work is accepted, there a few things that will happen:

You will need to read and sign a contract detailing:
What the lit mag needs from you (such as an updated bio) between that moment and publication.
What happens with the rights of your creative work ( this page by Poets & Writers details copyright information in more depth).
What compensation you will be provided with (if applicable).
You may correspond with an editor from the journal to perform final edits and/or revisions of your creative piece(s).
You may need to submit an updated author information, such as a bio, and/or a finalized version of your creative piece(s).
You need, if applicable, to immediately withdraw the work that is being published from any other lit mags you submitted it to. This is generally done by contacting the magazines through Submittable or by emailing the editors—lit mags’ Submissions page will generally clarify how they’d like to be notified if you need to withdraw part or all of your submission.

EXAMPLE ACCEPTANCE LETTER

Thank you for sending us “Exciting Title Number 1” and “Memorable Title Number 3.” We greatly enjoyed both of them and would like to publish them in Coffee Journal ’s next edition.

As per our submission guidelines, we offer three free copies of the edition in which your work appears. Please click here to confirm acceptance.

Thank you for sending your work! We look forward to hearing from you.

Audrey Li

Coffee Journal Poetry Editor

Just a few things to note, here:

Getting an acceptance does not necessarily mean the journal is accepting every piece of work your sent; it simply means they are accepting one (or more) of your pieces.
Generally, acceptance letters are more personalized; the magazine has chosen your work and is eager to make a good impression on you just as you’ve made a good impression on them. In this vein, acceptance letters are generally sent from the particular editor who chose your work or oversees your genre, whereas a rejection letter is often from the unnamed “Editors”.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Submitting work can be any number of things: exciting, gut-wrenching, confusing, tedious. Regardless of your personal attachment to—or detachment from—the submission process, it’s an important process to understand as a creative writer. Even though the odds may be that a rejection is much more likely than an acceptance, you never know unless you try.

Imagine if the writer of your own favorite book never took the chance to submit it for publication in the first place. Thank goodness they did take that chance so their writing could change you and others—in however big or small a way. This chance, submitting work for publication, is one that you can take, too.

Best of luck, and happy submitting!

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Submission Etiquette: The Cincinnati Review has a short, helpful article on submission reminders.

Writing Cover Letters: The Adroit Journal has a great piece explaining the ins and outs of cover letter writing.

Submission Opportunities: Driftwood Press: Where Else to Submit

The Invisible Art of Literary Editing : an in-depth look into the inner workings of literary magazines.

Submittable : a common platform lit mags will request submissions through.

REFERENCES

Jenkins, Marlin M. Somatic Pinging: An Interview with Hannah Ensor, Michigan Quarterly Review Blog, Mar 25, 2019, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2019/03/somatic-pinging-an-interview-with-hannah-ensor/ .

Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.

Submissions

We publish two issues a year, September 1 and March 1. We accept general submissions for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction between two reading periods, and the first 300 submissions to each are free. We also run a collaborative writing contest in August. We also accept visual art all year.

General Submissions: March 1 – May 1
General Submissions: October 1 – December 1
Collaboration Contest: July 15 – August 31

We are thrilled to finally be able to say that, starting with issue 17, we will be able to offer our contributors a small payment of $50 upon publication.

A Note on Our Aesthetic

We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color.

We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished.

Practical Matters

We are grateful to be a part of a literary community that is taking action against systemic racism. We will also be donating submission fees from our current reading period towards Black-led organizations and anti-racist collectives. In the next year, 25% of our submission fees will be donated, as well. Thank you in advance for helping us work together for change.

The best way to know the preferences of our individual editors is to read the journal. Our genre editors also take over our Twitter from time to time to discuss work we’ve published and why. Check it out at #editortalk .

Sundog Lit is serious about representing the literary scene and supporting diverse and underrepresented voices. We want to hear from women, people of color, queer and trans writers, and every community who pushes our world away from the oppressive status quo. This is our commitment to literature; hold us to that standard.

One submission at a tim e, please . We happily accept simultaneous submissions, though please withdraw immediately if accepted elsewhere. If part of a packet submission, note the withdrawal in a note on Submittable. We do not consider previously published material nor do we accept email submissions. Please address your submission to the appropriate genre editor, and be mindful of correct pronoun usage in your cover letter.

Genre Specifics

Summer Collaboration Contest Writing doesn’t have to be a lonely business. Sometimes teamwork is what makes the dreamwork, so this summer we want to see what you’ve created with another writer (or two or three⁠ — there’s actually no limit) for our annual Collaboration Contest. Between July 15 and August 31, submit your wildest, most inventive work of any or mixed genre. Just keep your hybrid masterpiece to 1,000 words or less. Winners will receive a $300 prize and all the glories of publication.

Refractions For our blog, we accept short-form work that fits a given topic or theme that asks you to see–and write about–familiar things differently. We want you to play with perspective. A little distortion, in our opinion, is a good thing. Please check Submittable for the current prompt, which we will change up on a quarterly basis.

Fiction We want muscular prose, authenticity, and a real beating heart. Play with form and show us the humorous absurd. Submit short stories of no more than 3,000 words or up to 3 flash fictions of less than 750 words each in a single document.

Nonfiction We are cool with traditional personal essay, memoir, etc. We LOVE us some experimental, research-driven stuff. Segmented. Lyric. Essays written in a bowl of alphabet soup. Surprise us. Play with form and content. If you hybridize some poetry and nonfiction, send it our way. Submit a single piece of no more than 4,000 words or up to 3 flash essays of less than 1,000 words each in a single document.

Poetry We want vivid, vibrant poetry. We like prose poems or straight poetry with prose elements. We like traditional poetry. Submit up to 3 poems in a single document.

Visual Art We’re looking for beautiful, fascinating, devastating cover art for our upcoming issues. We are happy to consider collage, but are looking only for pieces in which any original work has been substantially transformed and is no longer recognizable. We are not currently looking for photography. Submit up to 6 pieces at a time.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

The lyric essay.

Seneca Review
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With its Fall 1997 issue, Seneca Review began to publish what we've chosen to call the lyric essay. The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.

The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, "It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive." It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language - a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement.

What has pushed the essay so close to poetry? Perhaps we're drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity. The life span of a fact is shrinking; similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude. We turn to the artist to reconcoct meaning from the bombardments of experience, to shock, thrill, still the racket, and tether our attention.

We turn to the lyric essay - with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language - to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways. Anne Carson, in her essay on the lyric, "Why Did I Awake Lonely Among the Sleepers" (Published in Seneca Review Vol. XXVII, no. 2) quotes Paul Celan. What he says of the poem could well be said of the lyric essay:

The poem holds its ground on its own margin.... The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found.

-- Deborah Tall, Editor and John D'Agata, Associate Editor for Lyric Essays

A Journal of The Literary Arts

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If We’re Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay

By anna leahy.

March 9, 2021

“Suppose you want to write, in prose, about a slippery subject that refuses definition. Something like water, or the color blue. Like the word ‘lyric,’ or the word ‘essay,’” posits fiction writer Amy Bonnaffons in an essay about essays for The Essay Review. Suppose I want to do just that, as others have wanted to do—and have done. The word essay is from Latin for driving something out; it sets in motion, or is the evidence of motion. The lyric essay is going somewhere.

Bonnaffons continues, “The term ‘lyric essay’ brings poetry—[t]he highest of the literary arts—into the realm of nonfiction. The term ingeniously takes advantage of lyric’s double valence: 1) it definitely means poetic and 2) nobody can agree on what else it might mean.”

Valence is a favorite word of mine because it means different things in different contexts. I’ve spun a poem around concepts of valence; it begins with an epigraph of definitions.

Valence: in chemistry, atomic affinity; in biology, capacity to interact, to bind, to unite; in graph theory, the number of edges incident to a node; in ancient medicine, an extract, a potion; in politics, voting according to party competence; in psychology, the emotional value of an experience; in linguistics, the bonds a verb controls.

Valence comes from Latin meaning to be strong; vale was used as a greeting. Welcome, listen, be strong.

When I headed to an MFA program and even still, the common assumption seems to be that one must apply in a single genre, take workshops only in that genre, and write a thesis in that same genre, as I did in poetry. Not everyone wants to write in more than one genre, but why not?

Beth Ann Fennelly has published three poetry collections and is Poet Laureate of Mississippi, but her latest book is a collection of micro-memoirs, and it’s not her first collection of nonfiction. Paisley Rekdal is the author of five poetry books and is Poet Laureate of Utah, but her newest book is an extended essay, and it’s not her first nonfiction book. All three of us went to MFA programs where nonfiction was not an option. So, we are poets in the position to bring the poetic to the realm of nonfiction.

Poet Carl Phillips writes in the introduction to Yanyi’s collection The Year of Blue Water , “for all of the questing for stability, the fact that the self is ever changing includes an instability that deserves its own respect.” We are a sequence, and the lyric essay depends on it. But Phillips is writing about poetry.

I name this kind of sequencing, this necessary human changeability: trajectory.

The word trajectory comes from Latin meaning something thrown. It indicates not only direction in space but elapse of time: past, present, and future. Trajectory is the changing of position in time; it has momentum and dimension. We can see it or hear it—we can measure movement— because of context: time and space. In discrete mathematics, trajectory is a sequence that can be mapped. In engineering it is a collection of states of being in an unending operation, an instability that deserves its own respect. Trajectory might be understood as where and when, which are tangled within this essay as I keep moving along. Trajectory is the context for the I.

While trajectory may look like a straight line, Earth’s gravity shapes the path of what is thrown through the air; the path is a curve. Trajectory may look like direction, but direction is the looking, and trajectory depends on motion, on momentum. The word momentum comes from Latin meaning the power to move. The word moment came later, when measuring instants of time became useful.

No, that’s not true. A moment is not an instant. A moment is a minute; it’s something that takes time. An instant is a point in time but takes no time at all. An instant is a way of talking about time as if it were space.

Physicist Werner Heisenberg thought a lot about the uncertainty of measuring both position and speed—space and time—at once. Trajectory cannot be fully known as it’s happening. The path can be seen in hindsight. Moreover, Heisenberg argued that when we conduct an experiment—like writing an essay?—some of the knowledge obtained by previous experiments is destroyed.

Poet Louise Glück, in Proofs & Theories, writes of the unsaid and the unseen, the ellipses and the ruins: “Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.” The parts and the whole cannot be separated, according to Heisenberg. The whole is suggested by the shadow of parts, according to Glück.

And in the time it takes to discern where I am in this instant, I’ve moved on. An instant cannot be measured; it implies the time and space around it, or vice versa.

In one of his poems, Yanyi describes Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, which is what Nelson’s publisher calls “a genre-bending memoir,” which seems to be a way of saying lyric nonfiction in language that sells books. In an interview with The Atlas Review, Nelson describes her book as “an experiment with anecdote and lived theory.” I take this to mean that the writing rests on the experience of thinking as well as on thinking about experience. Or in the words of Bonnaffons,

“The lyric essay, with its associative logic and openness to visuality as a tool of meaning-making, may in fact be more suitable than other form for expressing embodied truths.” Associative logic— juxtaposition—is a habit of mind that bridges self and world. It embodies.

Nelson also points to this associative quality: “I was trying to smoosh things together that aren’t always smooshed.” Yanyi writes of The Argonauts ,“It reads like time, powered by adjacency, auras burned with other auras, each making the other another center.”

Time and adjacency is trajectory—then, there, now, here. The next-to, the brush-up-against, the smoosh. The Latin word for throw is iacere , which is also the root for both trajectory and adjacent.

Adjacency and momentum define each other; they create a multiplicity of centers.

In another poem, Yanyi writes, “I walked because I liked the companionship in going nowhere together, the endlessness of being with another person.” Pico Iyer writes something similar in The Art of Stillness: “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere.” Yanyi likes adjacency; he likes timelessness. So does Iyer. Adjacency— surroundings, context, connection—allows for trajectory without going anywhere at all. Like spinning, like orbiting.

Iyer is writing essays. Yanyi is not writing essays. Yanyi’s pieces are poems; the book won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. But how exactly are these writings not lyrics essays? Does each not take or fill enough space or time?

Claudia Rankine is a poet. In college, she studied with Glück, an adjacency in the history of poetry. Rankine’s book Citizen is subtitled An American Lyric and was a finalist for the National Book

Critics Circle Award in two categories: poetry and criticism. It won in criticism. As poetry, it won the PEN Center USA and Los Angeles Times book awards. A review in The Guardian explained this confusion over whether Citizen is poetry or essay: “The power of Citizen is such that questions of literary form tend to be set aside. It’s described as a prose poem, but it’s not quite what Rimbaud or Francis Ponge might have understood by that. Where Symbolist and Modernist prose poems often exhibit an almost-intolerable density of suggestion, Rankine works by impeccable timing within the paragraph, with an even tone enforcing an implacable verbal economy and exactitude.” The paragraph is space and time, position and momentum, but verbal economy and exactitude sound like poetry.

The word exactitude is from Latin referring precision or accuracy, as with measurement; it’s related to the Latin word for forcing something out. Citizen forces out a lot, personally and politically, emotionally and intellectually.

In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes, “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant.” That’s how Rankine appeared to change the lyric essay: in an instant. But this was not her first American lyric.

Rankine’s point is about patterns of racism and patterns of privilege. Citizen is about accumulation over time—the trajectory of instances.

In Rankine’s first book, Nothing in Nature Is Private, the length and shape of each piece—the space it takes or fills on the page and time on the breath—is what is generally considered contemporary American poetry. She’s doing something different now, something that looks like an essay, that uses space and time like an essay. She has brought poetry to nonfiction. Is she a poet or an essayist?

In an online symposium at Copper Nickel, three poets discussed their movement toward creative nonfiction. Shamala Gallagher opens by saying, “I began to write nonfiction out of frustration with my poetry.” While I have not faced what I would call frustration with my poetry, one of the benefits of working in both forms is that the range of possibilities limits the risk of writer’s block. There always exists another sort of thing to write.

Not every idea fits every form. The lyric essay offers additional spaces—shapes, sizes, syntaxes—for a poet’s ideas.

In that same conversation, James Allan Hall talks of being drawn to the essay’s capaciousness in contrast to the condensation of poetry. Don Bogen agrees, saying that essays give him “more room.” The poem and the essay are different kinds of room, and size—the amount of space—is part of that difference. Perhaps, writing poetry cultivates a particular awareness of and appreciation for the space of the lyric essay: dimensions, edges, room to breathe without catching the breath with a line break.

Yanyi says something along these lines: “Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear.” He is talking about poems in his poem that reads like a tiny essay. A space is a space is a space.

I studied Latin—beginning Latin—over and over, from high school through doctoral work. Only classics professors have conversations in Latin. It’s a dead language. But it’s here now, in trajectory, momentum, adjacent, syntax.

By 2010, I had moved for a new job and still felt disoriented in my sunny surroundings with avant garde colleagues on one side and genre-fiction colleagues on the other. I started reading Joan Didion, in part because I hoped she would help me understand what it meant to be a woman writer in California. Though Didion’s style isn’t much like my own, I began writing what I thought of as responses to her work because, at the time, I wasn’t sure how to start an essay on a blank page. After all, I am a poet.

I wrote my own versions of Didion’s “In Bed,” which is about her experience of migraine; “John Wayne: A Love Song,” which is about the actor; and “Marrying Absurd,” which is about a Las Vegas wedding she observes. I didn’t hide the influence; I highlighted the juxtaposition with Didion’s work. In hindsight, what I attempted was not imitation at all—I’m no Didion. Instead, these essays grapple with adjacency—my adjacency to Didion and her work’s adjacency to New Journalism, but also a variety of internal adjacencies in subject matter.

In Bonnaffons’s terms, Didion’s work was my side entrance: “Maybe lyric slips through the side entrance; maybe it tunnels into the basement; maybe it parachutes onto the rook and slides down the chimney. Perhaps the lyric doesn’t enter, just presses its face against the window and longingly observes.” Didion’s essays were windows I pressed my face against to observe both my own thoughts and the world all at once.

In a review of the recent documentary about Joan Didion, Brigid Delaney argues, Didion’s “fragmentary style […] renders an event closer to a form of poetry than the blunt instrument that is the inverted pyramid of news or even more conversational-style features.” The form is paragraphs, and the voice is journalistic, but Delaney seems to suggest that Didion makes her way through an essay’s paragraphs lyrically.

In his essay “The Opposite of Cool,” Joshua Wolf Shenk says of Didion’s writing, “She darts onto it [the stage], and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off.” Is the lyric essay a space into which I can dart, say something, and then dart out again, perhaps leaving a section break if I want to dart back in? “It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience,” Shenk writes, “but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance.” The place between enticing proximity and blunt distance is the adjacent. It’s why the whole is stunning.

Importantly, Shenk also points out that, though Didion writes in the first person, The Year of Magical Thinking is “not a memoir of grief. It is, quite explicitly, an essay about alienation from grief.” In hindsight, I realize this un-memoir way to write a personal essay was what attracted me to Didion’s writing. “On the page, Didion is the epitome of control, mastery, and clarity,” Shenk writes. “But this order seems to proceed from a chronic sense of meaninglessness, detachment, and distress.” Surrounded by an un-ordered world, control of form and language attracted me to poetry and then to the essay to create order in the mind and on the page.

In “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion writes, “I tell you this neither in a spirit of self- revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” Perhaps through yours— yes, mine! The first John Wayne movie I saw was Sands of Iwo Jima, and I remember the buzz when he went public with his cancer diagnosis. Before reading Didion, I’d never considered writing about John Wayne, but it turned out that I had plenty to say, and Didion’s essay invited me to say it, not as self-revelation (even as I revealed myself) nor as total recall (even as I wove through researched detail) but, rather, to figure something out about the relationship between the parts and the whole of what’s happened—the where and when of the I . My essay is called “Strange Attraction: John Wayne and Me,” and it’s about John Wayne to some extent and also about the nuclear age and my father’s cancer. When I finished this essay in July 2010, I sent it in response to a call for an Americana issue at The Southern Review and nowhere else. Less than six weeks later, editor Jeanne Leiby accepted this piece.

After that, the piece underwent fact-checking by Cara Blue Adams, which was an experience I hadn’t had as a poet and one that forced me to look at how the minutia of my essay mattered and fit together. Fact-checking seems about parts but is about the whole and its shadows.

Accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to an existing value. The less margin for error, the more accurate. It’s hitting the mark. Accuracy comes from Latin meaning to do something carefully, so the word refers to the rightness, to the trueness, of what’s observed.

Precision is different than accuracy. Precision refers to the reliability of the measurement. It means that if you measure the same phenomenon again, the value will be the same. It’s hitting the same mark again and again, but it might not be what you’re aiming for. If the result is not what you expected, that’s racked up to random error. Something done or said over and over isn’t necessarily right or true. But it can seem as real as anything else.

Precision, then, might be considered internal consistency, a way to make one’s way through the essay or, for that matter, memoir. Accuracy allows the lyric essay to accept the value of facts—its connection to the world—even as it takes leaps that appear chaotic, even as it smooshes. These leaps leave room room for juxtaposition and the adjacent.

Factual accuracy is a constraint I welcome as part and parcel to the essay form, just as I welcome constraints of syntax and grammar. Out of constraints, opportunities emerge. As soon as we write the first word, form the first paragraph, we are choosing constraints.

In a group interview at Electric Lit, Edwidge Danticat expresses appreciation for fact- checkers: “Someone will always question your interpretation of things, but I like to get the factual things as right as possible and I feel a bit crushed—and somewhat ashamed—when I don’t.” I share Danticat’s stance, not out of moral certitude so much as out of aesthetic possibility. I lie or imagine something into being only if I am honest about it being a lie or a supposition. Writing is a process of selecting, including, and interpreting; there’s more outside the paragraphs. Honesty, then, is often more complicated than trickery. Honesty can be scarier and more fun when the reader is in on it too.

The word honest comes from Latin meaning respected or decent, which is a way one can be perceived. The word trickery comes from Latin meaning a shuffling in order to be evasive, which is a shaping of others’ perception.

Accuracy is a kind of protection. I have double-checked my records, for instance, to be sure of the submission and acceptance dates and numbers for the essays I’m discussing here. I didn’t remember timeframes accurately; I had told myself a different story of my trajectory by erasing lag times in my memory. When I look back, I can see that, when “Strange Attraction” was published, I stopped submitting the other two essays I’d written.

Vulnerable comes from the Latin word for wounding, plucking, stretching.

For a while, I told myself I had beginner’s luck. Or I happened to find the right editor or judge for a particular piece. Or I timed it right, when content matched a particular editorial hole, though I did not think, at the time, how the editors where my work appeared over the next several years were white. The word particular comes from Latin meaning something so tiny that it is even less significant than an actual part of something.

And of course, I told myself that it must be easier to publish nonfiction than poetry—and why hadn’t anyone told me this before?

In 2010, the year I sent out my John Wayne essay, I also sent “Half-Skull Days” (about my experience of migraine) and “Marrying Absurd: An Update” (about my own Las Vegas wedding). A big fell swoop, and then I stopped submitting them.

All six outlets passed on “Half-Skull Days,” but I didn’t send it right back out after each rejection. More than a year later, I saw that an editor at The Pinch was looking for an essay to fill out an issue, so I sent it there and only there, where it was published and then listed as a Notable in The Best American Essays 2013. My point isn’t about success.

Why did I let this essay lie fallow right after another essay had been published? Did I not trust the lyric essay as a thing to do—that I could do? And then, why did I bother sending it out again? What if I hadn’t seen that side entrance call for essays? And who is most likely to find the way in through the side door?

From my initial round of submissions in 2010, my take on Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” was a finalist in a contest, which is the most encouraging form of rejection a writer can receive. And then I didn’t submit that piece again for five years, when I submitted it once at a time to seven outlets over eight months. And then “Marrying Absurd” won the creative nonfiction award from Ninth Letter, which feels like bragging to say. Confidence—or at least resilience and a good game face —was something I didn’t think I lacked until I looked back at my records.

Confidence, from the Latin for trust. I had a sense of my path, but I’d misremembered the pace. Am I a poet or an essayist now? What determines the shape and speed of our writerly dreams?

“I moved into nonfiction because that’s how things shook out,” Mary Mann tells E.B. Bartels in a multi-author interview at Electric Lit . Mann admits, “Maybe it was just the examples I had.” When I finally turned to nonfiction, I became absorbed intellectually by more types of essays, as had been the case with poetry years earlier. Bartels writes of Mann and others, “Almost every writer I interviewed told me that she first thought she was going to be a novelist. […] Instead, as you grow as a writer, nonfiction seems to choose you.” Bartels’s point is that those of us who write nonfiction don’t perceive it as a choice so much as necessary movement.

This statement also reveals assumptions between what G. Thomas Couser, in Memoir: An Introduction, calls “the two sibling genres” of fiction and life-writing that “share a good deal in the way of technique.” Poetry seems left out of these shifts and comparisons. Yet Couser asserts, too, that “all literature is sometimes divided among these modes: lyric (expressive), narrative (storytelling), and dramatic (presentation through enactment).” When I headed to my MFA, I chose poetry (expressive) over fiction (narrative) because I was more fascinated by form than plot, not because I valued expression (or self-revelation) over storytelling. Form offers ways to shape space and time. That’s what drew me to poetry and then to the lyric essay.

“Nonfiction feels like the only genre,” Elizabeth Greenwood tells Bartels. “I wish it were more of a decision!” Had I forced myself or been forced to pursue poetry? Was I really a nonfiction writer all along? Or was this path from poetry to an adjacent nonfiction the inevitable surprise?

Greenwood surmises that nonfiction is an especially good fit for her because “I lived equally in my head as in the world.” Both poetry and nonfiction are equally in my head and in the world. To echo Greenwood’s words further, both poems and lyric essays offer “the luxury of following my curiosities.” Several years ago, an editor said of a short piece I’d written, “Any essay that can juggle both [the scientist Enrico] Fermi and [the childhood game] Mystery Date wins me over right away.” I enjoy seeing how many disparate somethings I can smoosh into a single essay—that is my way through. Adjacency enacted, in response to and as fuel for curiosity.

[lyric essay = mind world]

Curiosity comes from two related Latin words, one meaning inquisitiveness and the other meaning careful, or diligent.

Couser sees another distinctive quality of memoir that, to my mind, points to a similarity between poems and lyric essays: “memoir may also be structured entirely without reference to the passage of time.” Sven Birkerts, in The Art of Time in Memoir, puts it another way: “Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency.” Memoir—and I would argue the personal lyric essay too, as memoir-adjacent—can depend on the relationship between the mind and the world, on the interplay between what’s considered subjective and objective.

While the craft of the personal lyric essay and memoir overlap, and while the range of creative nonfiction and the essay is wider and more varied than I’m discussing here, there’s something un-memoir about the lyric essay, too, something that undercuts or overshadows its I about-ness. something other than or in addition to self-revelation—an about-ness that is multiple. The lyric essay does not necessarily make the self the primary subject even when the self’s presence moves through the paragraphs.

“The route is often associative,” the second paragraph of Citizen begins.

In her book that is poetry and memoir and cultural criticism , Rankine uses the second person: you.

Shawn Wen’s A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause: An Essay is a lyric biography of mime Marcel Marceau. Wen is not the subject; there exists no authorial I. Wen writes, “Time passes. It sputters and stretches. What matters is not the speed of light, but the speed of thought.” She describes Marcaeu’s power as a mime as a manipulation of time that’s akin to that of the lyric essayist: “The mime refashions time, sculpting it with a precision instrument. He can suspend or hasten it at will. He marches in place for three minutes and a lifetime has passed.”

[lyric paragraph = space time]

∴

[lyric essay = paragraph || paragraph || paragraph]

The lyric essay prioritizes connection among this and this and this—then, there, now, here. Then, there, now, here—these are existing values for the lyric essay. Time and space serve as context for the self.

In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses some external measures of her essays: “Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible.” She asserts, “I am an academic,” which comes with certain assumptions about what she is supposed to write and where she is supposed to publish. She points to “a fundamental misunderstanding of what I do.” The result is that her “ethnographies have too much structure and [her] sociology is a bit too loose with voice. A bit slutty it all is, really, jumping between forms and disciplines and audiences.” One value is ethnography, another is sociology, and she’s off the mark for each. She’s hitting a mark of her own making, the one she’s aiming for as “a black woman who thinks for a living.”

Cottom goes on to say, “The essays in this volume dance along the line of the dreaded ‘first- person essay’.” But she isn’t trying to figure out how everything in the world is about her. Oh, the dreaded lyric essay, then. Her work is un-memoired and un-academic, and all the better for that double un-about-ness.

All these constraints about who is supposed to write what—and how we label a piece of writing based on who’s written it—add up: “We [black women] have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movement theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us.” Not everyone takes the same path, and the same path doesn’t treat everyone the same way. Of the mind and of the world, Cottom describes herself as “few people’s idea of an intellectual, public or otherwise, and showing up anyway” to write essays.

Maggie Nelson of The Argonauts talks of a similar issue in The Atlas Review, but her position is quite different than Cottom’s: “I’ve always written what I need and want to write, without thinking all that much about whether it’s personal or scholarly or esoteric or provocative or prose or poetry or whatever.” Such freedom of thought, of language! “I write about things that are typically coded as personal—the experience of having a body; of having sex, of having feelings, including ugly ones; anecdotes from my daily life; details about people I know and often love; and so on.” But she also says, “I don’t valorize the personal over the impersonal or the theoretical.” The self is not her only or primary subject matter.

The personal and the theoretical, the subjective and the objective, memoir and research, biography and philosophy, emotion and intellect—it’s all possible in the lyric essay. Perhaps, it’s all necessary too.

Birkerts suggests intuition of meaning emerged, for him, when “events and feelings […] arranged themselves into a perspective,” but he finds the word perspective, which is from Latin meaning to see through, too “fixed, even static.” Movement is necessary for lyric.

The lyric essay occurs when the writer, in words borrowed from Birkerts, has “discerned the possibility of hidden patterns.” Likewise, in The Book of Delights, Ross Gay writes, “Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up.” Shortly thereafter, he writes of the route he walks home: “What compels us into such grooves, such patterns?” Wen (and Marceau) uses—sees, creates—patterns; scene descriptions recur, as do lists of items in various collections. Cottom’s ideas and conclusions emerge from patterns.

Race is part of Cottom’s perspective, and the way events and feelings arrange themselves for her as a black woman. She always starts “by interrogating why me and not my grandmother?” Race is part of Gay’s perspective too: “Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind.

Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.” Like Nelson and Cottom, he writes of things typically coded as personal and plenty that’s of the world too. But each of us comes to the essay differently and are coded differently; position and speed vary.

Race is part of Birkerts’s, Nelson’s, and Didion’s perspectives too—and mine as well. But as white writers, we are not often expected to acknowledge this. We should acknowledge it anyway.

Patterns are iterations in and through space and time. They are instances; there exist things adjacent and implicit. The word pattern comes from the word patron, from Latin meaning defender, advocate, or model. Because the lyric essay discerns the possibility of hidden patterns, it is a model, a map of movement, a mockup of a trajectory of thought. It can be a way to defend, to advocate.

Why me? is not enough. Why me and not someone else? is a beginning.

Braid: to draw a sword, to throw to the ground, to knit.

Prism: something sawed into pieces, something that throws light at angles.

Mosaic: the work of the muses.

Web: something woven, like fabric.

Collage: something glued together. Both the parts and whole discernible.

Hermit crab: a crustacean that uses an empty seashell for protection.

Thank goodness I didn’t stop with Didion. I’d have gone only so far and not far enough.

In “The School of Roots,” Hélène Cixous traces origins of and connections among words:

clean in English, immonde in French, immondus in Latin. She is considering about what is edible and what is abominable. A few pages later, she writes, “If I gather these beings to talk about them in the same way, if I am worried by the fate of birds and women, it is because I have learned that not many people—unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—can really love, tolerate, or understand a certain kind of writing; I am using women and birds as synonyms.” She is talking about hidden patterns and how she is not writing as others expect her to write—or to think.

Her writing is a model of her thinking; it is of the mind. She is a philosopher, not a poet.

No, that’s not quite right. In an interview with Kathleen O’Grady, Cixous calls her own work “philosophico-poetical,” adding, “my theoretical texts are carried off by poetical rhythm.” The word lyric is Latin referring to words sung to the music of a lyre, but I haven’t talked much about sound because others have written much about sound and lyric, especially in the context of poetry. I am talking about trajectory and patterns.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a book that opens with the story of her mother leaving her all her personal journals. The journals turn out to be blank. The title of this book is When Women Were Birds, so Cixous is not the only one to connect—somewhat arbitrarily, it turns out for both Cixous and Williams—the two creatures, women and birds. Ross Gay refers to Williams’s book in The Book of Delights, and I’ve referred to him in this essay. Cixous, Williams, and Gay are connected in my mind and now on the page. Is this enough adjacency?

Those journals were white space. Of white space in essays, Bonnaffons says, “The white space might be read as the necessary separations between nodes of a network, or as intervals between distinct voices that together form a chord.” In an essay, meaning made of white spaces depends on the adjacent—the paragraphs—not on the blankness itself.

In a different section of her essay, Bonnaffons points out, “Rankine’s book reminds us that whiteness is more like willful ignorance, disavowed knowledge. […] Citizen’ s spare blocks of prose on blinding-white paper serve to underline this notion: to force the reader to confront whiteness as a part of the text.” She also points to the “absence of writers of color” in a recent anthology of essays. The adjacent matters to the essay, and absence does not suffice in its place.

On the next page of “The School of Roots,” Cixous is on to Ghandi. I’m not sure where she is or is going, but I know she’s somewhere and going somewhere. And soon she announces, “That is my theme for today: to be ‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy,” by which she means, “You no longer belong to the world.” You’re in the head. The un-ordered falls into place because she’s come back to those words for clean. She’s created an echo, a pattern.

Writing, Cixous says, “is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. […] This does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently than our thinking and speech.” The lyric essay resists what Cixous calls “a huge concatenation of clichés,” yet works by a different concatenation, which is a word drawn from Latin meaning chained together. As Jane Hirshfield says in Nine Gates, though she is talking about a poem not an essay, it “begins in language awake to its own connections […]. It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.” In the physical and in the mental, in the world and in the head, in space and time.

Hirshfield looks at origins and meanings, somewhat as Cixious does and as I have:

“Concentration’s essence is kinetic, and the dictionary shows the verb as moving in three directions,” namely toward a center, inward toward one’s own attention, and toward strength. Again, everything is moving, even if we’re not sure where it will end up or how long it will last.

And yet concentration feels like stillness.

“Sitting still,” Iyer suggests in The Art of Stillness, “as a way of falling in love with the world and everything it.” He posits, “Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.” The lyric essay depends on the world and the mind, on movement and paragraphs.

Iyer also says, “So much of our lives takes place in our heads—in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation—that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.” Putting the world into words changes the thing I write about. And the thing itself changes the writing that embodies it.

We’re going somewhere from here, from now, I’m sure of it. The trajectory of the lyric essay is the logic of movement and adjacency. We have a sense of where we are, but we can’t be sure until we’re somewhere else—and we don’t know exactly when we’ll get there.

Risking the Hug: An Examination of Sentimentality and Sincerity in Lars and the Real Girl by Daniel Abiva Hunt

Daniel Abiva Hunt holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, The Masters Review, CRAFT, Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches and studies fiction.

Poetic Endings: Nailing Down the Threshold by Dia Calhoun and Deborah Bacharach

Deborah Bacharach (left photo) is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review and a mentor with PEN America. She lives in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Dia Calhoun (right photo) is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Nashville Review, The Writer’s Chronicle; EcoTheo Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize and taught creative writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com.

The Manananggal as Mythmaking by Melanie Manuel

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her BA from UC Davis in English and Asian American Studies and is currently attending SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She is a recipient of the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She is the Production Editor for PI Online and teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies department. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine and North American Review , and she has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3 .

Delightfully Weird by Tommy Dean

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

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Search form, the beautiful, untrue things of the lyric essay.

Oscar Wilde’s most famous critical dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” begins with a well-meaning but uninformed man named Cyril inviting his male friend Vivian outside: “Don’t coop yourself up all day in the library,” he says. “Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.” [1]

Vivian, however, wants nothing to do with Nature, and complains of her “lack of design, her curious crudities, and her extraordinary monotony.” [2]

And thus Vivian and Cyril embark on a grand debate about the role of nature in art, and the problem with what Vivian calls “dull facts,” “depressing truths,” and “careless habits of accuracy.” “There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true,” says Vivian. And “if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.” [3]

Of course, this dialogue is about what Wilde saw as the insufferable realists of nineteenth-century fiction, so what does it have to do with us, a bunch of twenty-first-century essayists?

Vivian, as Wilde’s mouthpiece, gives us the answer near the end of the debate: “Those who do not love Beauty more than Truth,” he says, “never know the inmost shrine of Art.” [4] And in the context of our discussion, it is quite possible that those who do not love beauty more than truth may never know the inmost shrine of the essay.

Put differently, “The Decay of Lying” champions art for art’s sake. Read with an ear for the craft of creative nonfiction, the dialogue has all the workings of a manifesto on the lyric essay—what I might call truth for art’s sake. Consider Wilde’s four basic doctrines:

1. Art never expresses anything but itself.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature.

3. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. [5]

Here, I shall briefly discuss the first and last of Wilde’s statements.

First, art never expresses anything but itself — or, perhaps, for the purposes of our discussion, and with apologies to Wilde, the artist never expresses anything but him- or herself.

In “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian explains the doctrine this way: “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, [and] dreams.” [6] Art may use nature for its building blocks, but the final product is something entirely new, something reflective, not of the world, but of the inner workings of the artist. Consider Basil Hallward, the fictional painter who captured so beautifully the young Dorian Gray in Wilde’s only novel. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,” claims Basil. “The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” [7] Something similar could be said of the lyric essay—that it relies on the building blocks of memory, meditation, research, speculation, and even narrative, but that in the final product, the essay’s greatest revelation is the essayist. After all, Montaigne’s famous question was not “What do I see?” but “What do I know?” Likewise, Honor Moore calls the prose of the lyric essay a “vehicle of individual emotion,” [8] and D’Agata and Tall have called it a home for “idiosyncratic meditations.” [9] Ultimately what we want from a lyric essay is the interior knowledge of the writer. As Wilde says, “the vision . . . of the artist, is far more important to us than what he looks at.” [10]

Consider the arresting intimacy of Brian Doyle’s eulogistic essay, “Kaddish,” which relies on both structure and content to capture the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. [11] The essay consists of 217 one-line descriptions pulled from obituaries of the victims. [12] More than a tribute to the deceased, the essay attempts to re-create the writer’s emotional experience of that day. Each line falls down the page, evoking images of victims falling from the towers, but also giving each victim his or her own moment in time. As we read, we are simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and arrested by the reality of their individual humanity. What’s more, the title, “Kaddish,” tells us this essay is a prayer—not merely a private one, but a recitation, a ritual of sorts. Doyle hasn’t simply reiterated the public mourning of the obituaries, he has created a work of art that gathers and distills the public record and reframes it in a textual structure that reflects that day’s relentless barrage of images, as well as Doyle’s personal, prayerful reaction to the people in those images. It is a record not of what he saw or read, but of what he felt.

Phillip Lopate has registered skepticism about the lyric essay for its “refusal to let thought accrue to some purpose.” [13] But what if that is precisely the point—to capture thought and emotion before it has accrued to some external determination? Oscar Wilde wrote that the “basis of life . . . is simply the desire for expression.” [14] Regardless of any larger social, political, or spiritual implication, the form of the lyric essay is primarily a vehicle for expressing the interiority of the artist. As Wilde scholar Lawrence Danson puts it: “Realists claim that they refer to a world out there; Wilde claims that the only significant out-there begins in here.” [15]

And that brings us to the second of Wilde’s doctrines that I will discuss here, his fourth and final, and for writers of the lyric essay, perhaps most controversial: the doctrine that says, “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

And before you wonder if I’m going “there” with this presentation, before you divide yourself off in either the D’Agata/Shields/Dornick camp on the left or the Gutkind/Lopate/Levy camp on the right, before we start fighting about truth in nonfiction and the relative fallibility of memory, and that oversimplified claim that all writing is a lie, let me just say that if Oscar Wilde were here to witness such a debate, I like to think he’d rub his hands with delight, and say we were all missing the point.

Ezra Pound said that literature is language charged with meaning. [16] If that is true, then perhaps the essay is truth charged with meaning. But how, you might ask, do we infuse truth with meaning? That is where Oscar Wilde comes in. His warning about “our monstrous worship of facts” is a call for resistance to realism that “finds life crude, and leaves it raw,” and is born of a desire for art that dictates terms to nature, and not the other way around. [17] “Nature is no great mother who has borne us,” writes Wilde. “She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.” [18] The meaningfulness that we draw from narrative, that we draw from juxtapositions and associations, that is born of research and speculation, these are the beautiful untrue things that are the proper aim of art—not the mere mimesis of reality, but the generation of new truths out of its building blocks.

As an example of this type of lying at work in the essay, let us reconsider one of the sacred tenets of the genre—that the essay imitates the mind at work. The idea is as old as Montaigne, who wrote, “I chiefly paint my thoughts.” [19] Scott Russell Sanders claims that the essay is “the closest thing we have on paper to a record of the individual mind at work and play.” [20] And as I read the lyric essays of writers such as Eula Biss, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and others, and experience the meandering, fragmented, associative playfulness of their work, I see what Montaigne and Sanders mean. And yet, there’s something about this idea that also bespeaks a Wildean Lie.

The venerable Carl Klaus writes, “It’s an alluring idea . . . to affirm . . . that the essay reveals the mind of the essayist.” But Klaus “wonders how one could possibly make such an inference without being privy” to that mind. As he sees it, “the mind’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.” [21]

If Klaus is right, then the notion that the essay re-creates the mind at work is precisely the kind of beautiful , untrue thing that lends both beauty and truth to a lyric essay. Consider for a moment Wilde’s own evidence for this concept—the French impressionists. “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,” asks Wilde. [22] According to Wilde’s logic, fog didn’t exist until artists gave us a way of seeing it. In other words, the romantic image of a London fog is a lie that art has told us about nature. However, such a lie does not mean that these images are untrue, but merely that such images are a truth about the artist, and not necessarily a truth about the world itself.

Likewise, where—if not from Montaigne, White, Didion, Biss, and others who play in zigzagging, fragmented forms—do we get our wonderful ideas about the associative, reflexive, even lyric way that our minds process information? The essay might show the mind at work, but only because the essay has given us an idea of how to think about our minds in the first place. My true mind is scattershot, it goes off in dead ends, gets stuck on song lyrics, it daydreams, falls asleep, turns on the television and tunes out. My cultivated mind on the page of an essay, in contrast, wants always to be alert to the connectivity of things. As Klaus writes, “Even if one could get inside the head of another human being, I have a hunch that its workings would turn out to be far messier than anything in a personal essay.” [23]

Now, in the first half of this paper, I’ve argued that expressing interiority is the primary role of the lyric essay. But here in the second half I’m arguing against the notion that interiority can be expressed at all, maintaining that such expression is little more than one of Wilde’s beautiful untrue things. But far from negating the first half of my argument, this apparent contradiction proves that the artful life is a necessary part of expressing interiority.

Consider other artful lies of the lyric essay, such as the selective cutting away of reality and superfluous details, or the amplified significance of certain experiences, certain memories, certain people. Or the way a lyric essay might adopt a particular form—a final exam, a series of found postcards, a Google map—and the way such forms generate new ways of seeing that go beyond the seemingly inexorable facts of nature. “Art itself is really a form of exaggeration,” writes Wilde. “And selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” [24]

Of course, we must not take Wilde’s advice entirely to heart. I’m not sure I would say, as he did in regard to writers of realist fiction: “we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.” But I might venture that in all the discussion and occasional vitriol about the ethics of information in nonfiction, we may have overlooked the ethics of art and its integral role in helping us render the interior emotional experiences of our lives—those experiences that must be translated to one another if we are to, as Lopate so aptly put it, help each other feel “a little less lonely and freakish.” [25]

So how do we balance our desire to represent real experiences with art’s insistence on the lie? How do we take what nature has given us and move beyond it, not with an arrogant disregard for what actually happened, but with a humble willingness to let the essay uncover what actually matters? After all, if Wilde is right about nature being our creation, then any responsibility we have to nature is first a responsibility to ourselves.

Judith Kitchen put it this way: “The job of the lyric essayist is to find the prosody of fact, finger the emotional instrument, play the intuitive and the intrinsic, but all in service to the music of the real. Even if it’’s an imagined actuality. The aim is to make of not up. The lyre, not the liar.” [26]

Consider what Kitchen is saying here: the heart of the lyric essay is not reality, not nature, but the music of reality, the music of nature as conceived in the mind of the essayist—the music of beautiful untrue things, which, as Wilde says, is the proper aim of art.

[1] Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Intentions (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1904), p. 3.

[3] Ibid., p. 9.

[4] Ibid., p. 47.

[5] Ibid., p. 49.

[6] Ibid., p. 20.

[7] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

[8] Honor Moore, “Origin of the Species,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 102.

[9] John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, “New Terrain: The Lyric Essay,” Seneca Review 27, no. 2 (1997): 3.

[10] Quoted in Paul L. Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 30.

[11] Brian Doyle, Leaping (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2003), pp. 132–40.

[12] Brian Doyle, in email conversation, 14 February 2014.

[13] Phillip Lopate, “A Skeptical Take,” Seneca Review , 37, no. 2 (2007): 31.

[14] Wilde, Intentions , p. 36.

[15] Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 55.

[16] Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 2010), p. 36.

[17] Wilde, Intentions, p. 11.

[18] Ibid., p. 37.

[19] Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

[20] Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” in Essays on the Essay, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 32.

[21] Carl Klaus, The Made-up Self (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), p. 20.

[22] Wilde, Intentions, p. 37.

[23] Klaus , Made-up Self , p. 20.

[24] Wilde, Intentions, p. 21.

[25] Phillip Lopate, Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor, 1996), p. xxxii.

[26] Judith Kitchen, “Mending Wall,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 47.

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About the author, joey franklin.

Joey Franklin's essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle , The Norton Reader , Gettysburg Review , and elsewhere. He was the 2011 winner of the Sport Literate essay contest, and his first collection of essays is due out through University of Nebraska Press in 2015. He teaches creative writing and literature at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

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Bluets and the lyric essay, emerson’s ‘experience’, bluets and the string of beads.

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Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

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Georgia Walton, Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , English: Journal of the English Association , Volume 72, Issue 276-277, Spring-Summer 2023, Pages 55–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efad012

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This article examines the previously underacknowledged influence of nineteenth-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the contemporary essayist and memoirist Maggie Nelson, in particular the 2009 book-length essay Bluets . Nelson’s hybrid texts have often been seen as key examples of the quintessentially contemporary genre of the lyric essay. My argument here complicates the claims of originality that have been made for this genre and instead identifies Nelson’s formal concerns as the product of a profound engagement with a nineteenth-century model. Through my analysis of Bluets , I suggest that Emerson’s influence is key to understanding Nelson’s formal hybridity and, in turn, her particular representation of the relationship between the subject and the world. Through her engagement with Emerson, Nelson arrives at an understanding of subjecthood that is based on a radical dependency but that is also individually defined and self-sufficient.

People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. 1

Nelson suggests that Emerson’s essays complicate the claims of originality that have sometimes been made for the recent proliferation of hybrid texts by Anne Boyer, Claudia Rankine, and Olivia Laing that all mix the literary with the documentary and the personal with the critical. 2 Emerson’s essays inhabit a space between literature and philosophy. They combine theoretical observations on the world and the self with a poetic, gestural mode of expression. The legacy of his aphoristic, ‘sentence by sentence’ style of writing is evident in Nelson’s own prose, which can be seen for instance in the way in which it moves fluidly from one idea to another. In addition to this evidence of his impact on style, she regularly quotes from his essays in her published works; though mentioned only once in The Argonauts , he is frequently cited in the earlier memoir Bluets (2009) and referenced in the critical works, The Art of Cruelty (2011) and On Freedom (2021). Despite Nelson’s clear indebtedness to Emerson both in these works and elsewhere, critics and reviewers alike have not acknowledged his recurrent appearance in, or influence on, her writing. This is, in part, because he is one of numerous references in her work. Nelson is known for the way in which she repeatedly cites artists, philosophers, and critical theorists alongside personal reflection. For instance, she regularly quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roland Barthes. Critics have emphasized her inheritance from writers such as Eileen Myles, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, concentrating on her texts’ investments in queer theory. 3 However, Emerson, to whom she repeatedly returns in multiple texts, is an overlooked influence on her work.

In this article I directly address her inheritance from him in Bluets , showing how he influences both the formal construction of this hybrid memoir and, in turn, the way in which it represents subjecthood as fundamentally intersubjective and relational. I read Bluets in relation to Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ (1844). My analysis focusses on a trope common to both Emerson and Nelson; I suggest that the fragmentary form of Bluets is profoundly influenced by Emerson’s statement in ‘Experience’ (1844) that ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue’. 4 The numbered propositions of Nelson’s text function as sequential beads, or lenses, through which its ‘I’ sees the world. At the same time, the closed off beads in Bluets represent the relationship between the subjects and the other as oppositional, the self is defined against the other.

The circular image of the bead is a type of, what Caroline Levine has called a, ‘bounded whole’. 5 It offers ways of delineating between the internal and the external. The negotiation of what is within and what is without the boundaries of selfhood is key to Nelson’s use of this image. Though it erects a boundary, what it contains is neither fixed nor monolithic. Levine sees the forms of literary texts as able to hold difference and bring together contrasting elements. Furthermore, she writes that while unifying forms ‘impos[e] limits’, they also ‘makes thinking possible’. 6 The circular image that Nelson borrows from Emerson offers these affordances. The beads are defined forms, but they juxtapose changing ideas and contrasting perspectives, structuring thought in order to articulate it. In doing so they signify a discrete identity, but one that is also pliable, able to be challenged, altered, and influenced.

The combination of subjective experience and theoretical or philosophical engagement is a key aspect of Emerson’s writing. His essays expound the primacy of individual perspective and both his work and that of his fellow transcendentalists is associated with philosophies of individualism. Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), a key example of this concern in his work, explains the importance of developing an independent outlook. He writes there, that ‘the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude’. 7 As well as this individualistic attitude, his essays are characterized by the use of metaphor and image through which they articulate their idiosyncratic perspectives. They are also well-known for their lack of logic and the inconsistency of statements both within and between them. This is something that Emerson explicitly endorses as, for instance, in ‘Self-Reliance’ where he famously proclaims that ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. 8 Borrowing from Emerson’s use of metaphor and symbolism, Nelson develops an imagistic and densely patterned style with a strong impression of formal unity through which she represents individual identity as self-contained and defined. Though, as I go on to show here, both this formal unity and defined identity are also mutable and able to hold difference. In this manner she also inherits from the multiplicity and refusal of consistency that characterizes Emerson’s work.

My suggestion that Nelson’s engagement with Emerson allows her to arrive at a mode of writing that emphasizes intersubjectivity and relationality may seem at odds with his suggestion in ‘Self-Reliance’ that ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’. 9 Emerson explicitly rejects the idea of society, seeing it as promoting conformity and suppressing the distinctiveness of individual subjects. Instead, he sees independent thought as central to personhood. However, my suggestion that he influences Nelson’s representation of an interrelated subjectivity fits in with recent critical work on him and other transcendentalist writers such as Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman. Benjamin Reiss has applied the insights of disability studies to show that transcendentalism was not a purely individualistic enterprise. Through biographically focussed readings of Emerson, Fuller and Whitman, he argues that they ‘all felt the material effects of disability on their own capacity to produce work [and] were attuned to the importance of interdependency’. 10 My reading of Emerson’s impact on Nelson’s work thus corresponds with recent critical re-evaluations of his writing. Emerson’s influence on the formal construction of Nelson’s texts causes her to arrive at an idea of selfhood that is both self-reliant and interdependent.

In the quotation with which I began, Nelson describes Emerson as a forerunner to contemporary works of ‘creative nonfiction’. This is a catch-all term that implies the use of literary techniques to present a factual account. While Nelson’s writing can be classified under this broad umbrella, the term itself is too vague to be particularly helpful. Instead, following on from the work of John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, I categorize Bluets as a ‘lyric essay’. 11 These are works that combine elements of poetry and of essays. The term connotes the poetic style of writing in Nelson’s texts as well as their combination of theoretical and personal themes. Because of this it is more encompassing than the terms autotheory and critical autobiography which have often been used to describe the works of Nelson and others (such as Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk). 12 Those terms emphasize the mixture of theoretical and autobiographical modes in Nelson’s writing. However, these are only two of the three elements of Nelson’s formal hybridity that interest me here – the personal and the theoretical, but not the poetic. The lyric essay suggests all three. In particular it suggests a link with lyric poetry, a form that is often seen to be the expression or representation of a particular subjectivity. However, the relationship between D’Agata and Tall’s term and previous definitions of the lyric is somewhat undertheorized, something I rectify here. In my analysis of Nelson’s texts, I consider some of the connections between lyric essays and lyric poetry.

One of the main ways I do this is through a discussion of the figure of apostrophe, a key element of the latter form. Apostrophe, as a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses an absent person, concept, or thing, is fundamentally linked to the way in which the subject defines themself against, or relates to, the other. Therefore, it is the most pertinent feature of the lyric to the argument of this chapter. In particular, I show how Nelson subverts apostrophe’s suggestion of an absent other through the use of an epistolary form. This is a decision that she explicitly refers to in the text. In Bluets , when discussing Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ (1971), she writes: ‘The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line – “Sincerely, L. Cohen” – as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter’. 13 The epistolary form subverts apostrophe because, though it addresses an absent other, it is usually with the intention that that other will eventually read it. Therefore, though a self-contained expression of an individual perspective, it is a form of communication designed to convey thought and feeling to a particular individual. Bluets is addressed to a you, though as I go on to show, its aim to communicate effectively with an other is accompanied by varying levels of anxiety.

Bluets is an important example of a lyric essay and is often discussed in articles that theorize the form more generally. 14 It is laid out in 240 short propositions which contain personal, philosophical, and critical reflections on the colour blue. These fragmentary propositions are arranged in a free-flowing stream. Though all written in prose, they are composed in a lyrical, rhythmic style reminiscent of poetry. Nelson shifts between them without a sense of chronology or particular thematic linkage (aside from the focus on blue). Despite the lack of perceivable logic, there are characters and narrative threads that run throughout, creating subtle coherence. The most important of these are the end of a relationship with a lover who is dubbed the ‘prince of blue’ and the care of a friend rendered quadriplegic after a cycling accident. 15 As the focus on blue suggests, the book expresses and explores the experiences of heartbreak, grief, and solitude.

Critical work on Nelson’s texts has primarily discussed her blend of critical theory and personal reflection. The later book The Argonauts has been the focus of the most scholarly attention, much of this looking at the ways in which it is both influenced by and extends twentieth-century queer and feminist traditions of confessional writing. 16 Likewise, Bluets has also been the focus of critical work which encompasses queer themes, for instance its engagement with twentieth-century figures such as Derek Jarman, but with an additional focus on its form. 17 Here, I identify an alternative genealogy which reads the text in relation to nineteenth-century forms and ideas about subjectivity. While the vast majority of critical attention to Nelson’s work has looked at these twentieth-century influences, one article does attend to Emerson’s presence in The Argonauts , however this remains focussed on her engagements with queer theory. Katie Collins argues that Nelson’s text borrows the concept of ‘thinning’ from Emerson as a way of revisioning the ‘queer negativity’ of Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ 18 My argument also shows how Nelson invokes Emerson to move away from the pessimism of some twentieth-century schools of thought. However, I attend instead to the way in which the hybrid form of Bluets is shaped through an engagement with Emerson which in turn helps her to conceive of the subject as composite and socially formed.

Bluets opens with a hypothesis: ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.’ 19 What follows is a stream of consciousness meditation on the colour blue. Though Nelson’s prose is free flowing and digressive, these meditations are organized into numbered propositions that are at most 200 words long. In these propositions Nelson discusses blues found in artworks, literature, song lyrics, film, nature, and the built environment. For example, she positions references to works by Joseph Cornell, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Andy Warhol, and Leonard Cohen alongside descriptions of scraps of tarpaulin and the nest of the male bowerbird who collects blue objects for his elaborate mating ritual. As she details her love of blue objects and artworks, she also references the experiments and inventions of scientists such as Isaac Newton and Horace Bénédict de Sassaure who investigated the nature of colour perception and tried to measure the blue of the sky. Throughout these meandering meditations, Nelson reflects on the nature of sensory perception and its relationship to emotion; the text plays on the idea of ‘the blues’ as a depressive emotional state. Its magpie-like (or bowerbird-like) arrangement of blue objects, artworks, and anecdotes works as a conduit for Nelson’s consideration of grief, loneliness, and depression. In Bluets then, as well as being representative of personal emotion, the colour blue is also a vehicle for phenomenological enquiry. Nelson uses its multiple manifestations and connotations to broach questions about the ways in which the subject perceives the world. I suggest here that these combined uses of the colour blue means that it functions in Bluets as a metaphor for the form of the lyric essay itself. It represents the qualities that the lyric essay is seen to hybridize: namely the presentation of an individual perspective, complex, evocative language, the deployment of critical arguments based on observation, and the critical appraisal of art and literature. In order to develop this line of argument, I will now briefly reflect on the critical definition of this form.

The lyric essay is a sub-genre or offshoot of the term creative non-fiction and both are a product of the creative writing courses and writing workshops in American universities that grew exponentially in the late twentieth century. 20 Ned Stuckey-French argues that the term lyric essay was coined in reaction to the idea that essays present empirically verifiable information in a systematic manner. 21 Indeed, in the introduction to the Seneca Review Special Issue on the form, D’Agata and Tall define it as borrowing from the poem ‘in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language’ and from the essay ‘in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form’. 22 They argue that it encompasses both ‘poetic essays’ and ‘essayistic poems’ that ‘give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information’. 23 The main feature of the lyric essay is then its refusal to present its content in the systematic or argumentative manner usually associated with critical writing. It does this particularly through its allusion to poetry. D’Agata and Tall use the word lyric in order to signify a poetic mode of expression or a self-consciously literary use of language. However, as I briefly suggested above, it does more than signify the ‘imaginative’ use of form. Instead, it implies links with lyric poetry, a relationship I will now set out in more depth.

In what is arguably the most important critical study of the lyric, Jonathon Culler writes that the conventional idea of the lyric poet was of a writer who ‘absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity’ (though Culler challenges this idea, it endures in critical conceptions of the form). 24 Nelson’s employment of Emersonian imagery in Bluets creates the unity that Culler describes. Through the focus on blue and the use of Emerson’s string of beads, Nelson creates a densely patterned text with an internal cohesion. In fact, the circular motif that imposes this unity is itself a metaphor for the subjectivity that the work expresses. This unity is both produced by and helps to develop the representation of a defined sense of self in the text. Moreover, Culler says that lyric poems ‘illuminate or interpret the world for us’. 25 This definition bears many similarities to D’Agata and Tall’s seminal definition of the lyric essay in that it combines attention to the world with an imaginative mode. This imaginative mode of expression is an expression of subjectivity. Both the lyric essay and the lyric poem dramatize the subject viewing the world. The lyric essay differs from lyric poetry then, in its closer ties to the essay’s ‘allegiance to fact’. It self-consciously reworks a form that relies on systematic argument and ‘fact’ but undercuts these through the deployment and consideration of its own subjective viewpoint.

Both these modes are encompassed in Nelson’s use of the colour blue. In Bluets , blue is an observable part of the external world and thus subject to scientific enquiry; it is the medium and subject of visual, literary, and musical artists; and it is a condition of inner life, an affective state. The first and last of these are, to some extent, paradoxical ways of approaching knowledge. This paradox is one of the central features of the lyric essay which includes facts, empirical evidence, and analysis alongside its articulation of personal ways of seeing. Throughout Bluets , through her myriad uses of the colour blue, Nelson tries to reconcile these two ways of thinking about experience and knowledge.

79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,’ wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, not matter what its hue, can be deadly. 26

Emerson speaks of the inner mood metaphorically colouring the individual’s observation of the world. In Bluets , Nelson literalizes this metaphor. The text is filled with blue objects, through which its speaker considers the external world and her relationships with others. By collaging references to blue things, Nelson creates a blue bead through which she invites her reader to view the world. Indeed, this literalism can be seen in the text when, a few pages after this proposition, Nelson continues to refer to Emerson’s metaphor. The speaker says, ‘I have made efforts, however fitful, to live within other beads’, before telling us how she bought a tin of yellow paint and painted her whole apartment with it. 27 The string of beads offers a method for thinking about the way in which the form of Bluets produces the relationship between the self and the external world. The metaphor has two connotations that are present in Bluets : first, that the inner life and experience of the external world are mediated through vision, and secondly, that the subject moves through multiple different ways of relating to the world. Through her primary subject of the colour blue, Nelson uses vision to understand the relationship between inner life and observation and through the text’s shifting numbered propositions, she represents experience as ever-changing and sequential. Alexandra Parsons sees Wittgenstein and Goethe as the ‘primary influences’ on Nelson’s use of colour as a way of exploring how to communicate experiences of pain (either emotional or physical). 28 I instead suggest here that Emerson’s metaphor of the string of beads, and its concomitant idea of coloured lenses, are central to understanding the way in which Bluets negotiates empirical and personal modes of writing.

The two modes that the lyric essay hybridizes are also evident in Emerson’s essays, which are often seen to inhabit a space between philosophy and literature. They reject the systematic construction of argument and refuse to develop specific moral positions. As Stanley Cavell writes, Emerson was a writer ‘famously intimidated by formal argument’. 29 This quality in his work has often led to a confusion about where to place him in terms of discipline: are his essays philosophy or literature? Though Cavell’s work on Emerson has done much to rehabilitate him as a philosopher in the twentieth century, as Joseph Urbas points out, Cavell’s readings themselves refuse logical parameters. 30 This refusal to present logical arguments both within Emerson’s work and in his, arguably, most influential recent critic, allows us to trace a tradition of philosophical writing that refuses coherence and the formal conventions of argument. Thus, we see the boundary between literature and philosophy being challenged within the latter discipline also. The lyric essay develops a scholar-subject and thus challenges the idea of knowledge as something verifiable and objective. In the work of Cavell, we find an example of Emerson-influenced philosophical work that also does this. ‘Experience’, composed in the wake of the death of Emerson’s young son Waldo is notable in his oeuvre for the way in which it draws on personal experience while also offering abstracted and philosophical propositions.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. 31

Emerson characterizes mood as colour in order to show how an individual’s emotions alter the way in which they look at the world. This alteration is both literal and figurative. He speaks of nature and books; the reference to nature suggests the literal and immediate act of seeing the physical world, whereas books suggest intellectual, artistic, and emotional consideration of it. Both types of knowledge acquisition are transformed by the state of mind in which the subject arrives at them. For Emerson this highly subjective empirical experience is a changeable phenomenon; the subject moves through different perspectives or ‘moods’, which continuously alters her experience of the world. The metaphor is fundamentally about vision. Emerson sees the beads as lenses. Whilst lenses enable vision, they also limit it. They provide a frame or boundary which forecloses any wider vantage point. The bead itself is a ‘bounded whole’, a self-contained and fixed circle that has a limiting power to cohere. This cohesion is here the self-contained logic of depression; the subject trapped within their own bead can only see the world through their own perspective, which takes on an internal and, to them, inarguable logic. Emerson’s image of the mountain further resists notions of an expansive vision. This image suggests that, though we might think we can reach a point at which we can survey the world from a position of detachment, what we really see is the foundation of our perspective. He thus suggests that the idea of critical detachment or claims to objectivity are forms of self-knowledge, or knowledge produced by the self. You can only ever see from the ground on which you are standing. The subject is only able to gain more insight into their own embodied position.

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 32

In this celebrated image, Emerson describes a complete dissolution of the ego and of the body through the act of looking. The observer becomes one with the thing that she observes, here nature in its entirety. This is completely reversed in ‘Experience’ where the object of observation is entirely transformed by the inner emotional state of the viewer. Indeed, in the later essay, he writes that, ‘Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them’ rather than the erosion of the seer that is found in the transparent eyeball. 33 With the transparent eyeball there is an immediacy to the act of looking, the subject is represented as comprising of pure unmediated vision. In ‘Experience’ the beads repeat the spherical imagery and transparent nature of the eyeball, but instead the subject is trapped within them, rather than dissolving itself. Furthermore, in ‘Nature’, all space and time is collapsed into the expansive vision of a single moment. This is something that is also inverted with the string of beads. In this later metaphor, vision is limited, constrained but also linear. The subject moves from one perspective to another but cannot access either the expansive vision found in ‘Nature’ or their own previous perspectives. As Emerson writes in ‘Circles’ – a line that Nelson partially quotes in bluet 234. – ‘Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow’. 34 The string of beads suggests a perspective that is limited and changeable but not cumulative.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature – in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries) – that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 38

Throughout the text, the colour blue alternates between being a way of seeing and an object of desire or observation. Here it is the latter. Typical modes of mastery such as owning, and ingesting are not available, so the speaker hypothesizes about situations in which she might attempt to learn more about blue: immersing herself in it, using it to decorate her own body, and using it as a tool of artistic representation. In her equation of desire and research, Nelson emphasizes the erotics of scholarship, suggesting that the pursuit of knowledge is motivated by eros. However, none of these actions afford access to the colour itself. Instead, the speaker remains painfully separated from the object, the blue which she cannot access. This means that her knowledge is limited, she cannot gain a full knowledge of what she observes.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simple language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me”. 89. As if we could scrape the colour off the iris and still see. 39

In this passage, blue becomes a part of the apparatus of sight. In this way, Nelson’s speaker occupies a comparable position to that found in Emerson’s string of beads; her perception of the external world cannot be divorced from her inner life. The very lens with which one views the world is coloured by mood. Nelson’s metaphor here collapses Emerson’s transparent eyeball and string of beads together. The colour of the iris becomes the coloured glass of the bead. In the passage this has the effect of recognizing the impossibility of separating one’s depression from oneself. In using the colour of the iris as a metaphor for subjective viewpoint, Nelson collapses the subjective viewpoint with the object, or cathexis, here the colour blue. Despite saying that she does not want to live within blue – ‘For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it’ – Nelson makes the colour of the eye itself the mode of engaging with the world. The speaker thus takes up an auto-erotic position, in which the cathected object is part of her own body. In doing so she collapses the distance between subject and object.

She hopes to achieve this integration through the act of writing, in particular through writing a letter. As I suggested in the introduction to this article, Nelson structures her lyric essays as letters as a subversion of the lyric apostrophe. Discussing the trope more generally Culler argues that ‘the vocative of apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship that helps to constitute him’. 40 The use of apostrophe is ‘an invocation of the muse’ that cements the poet’s own status as a poet. 41 Furthermore, it also has a sorrowful and elegiac tone. As Denis Flannery shows ‘apostrophe is caught up with mourning and the elegiac, a capacity to articulate and direct grief’. 42 This elegiac mode is apparent in both Bluets and ‘Experience’ which explicitly reflect on loss, loneliness, and grief. However, both Emerson and Nelson resist the conventional element of apostrophe as invoking the muse purely for the development of the poetic subjectivity. Instead, they aim for a more communicative mode that really hopes to address the absent other rather than merely define themselves against it. A genuine interest in the addressee is evident throughout Emerson’s work. A prolific letter writer, he was attentive to the way in which the writing subject was constructed in relation to the recipient. Furthermore, as a popular public speaker Emerson was used to writing for an audience whom he would perform in front of. As Tom F. Wright has shown, Emerson’s essays questioned the relationship between the individual and the self by being constructed as though they were addressing an embodied audience. 43 They transform apostrophe then, by imagining a present other rather than an absent one. In this, they are written with the express desire of communicating something to a receptive listener in that moment.

There remains the question of how the apostrophe works as it is adapted for the lyric essay. I suggest here that it operates as an assertion of the position of an empirical observer of the world while also being concerned with the subject position of a poet. Therefore, the subject of the lyric essay is simultaneously constructed as both scholar and poet which, in turn, redefines the scholar-subject more generally as a lyrical subjective position. This presents a challenge to traditional ideas about the construction of knowledge. The knowledge in the lyric essay is always being presented as highly subjective and therefore rejects the notion of a truth that exists outside of individual perception. Bluets presents any critical analysis or research about blue through the lens of an idiosyncratic perspective that is coloured by mood and affect. Therefore, its speaker is both observer and feeling subject. This view does not correspond with previous criticism on the lyric essay. In an article in which she analyses Bluets , Corrina Cook argues that ‘the lyric essay’s narrator is best understood not as a speaker at all, but as a listener’. 44 Though I agree that Bluets sees subjecthood as interrelational and therefore receptive (perhaps through the act of listening) to the external world, Nelson’s subversion of apostrophe shows the text to be one entirely about articulating one’s own viewpoint through writing.

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter around with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you. 45

In this passage Nelson rejects the mystery and romance of the unsayable or the incommunicable. In doing so, she refuses the conventions of apostrophe. Instead of addressing an absent other through whom she constructs an authorial voice, she states explicitly that she wrote in order to communicate something. The presence of this unread letter in the text represents an anxiety about the communicative potential of writing. But perhaps, also a delusion about the nature of the relationship between writer and addressee in letter-writing. Nelson’s ex-boyfriend transforms the letter into a symbol and, in doing so, renders its content irrelevant. This is a gendered relation that recalls unread or undisclosed letters throughout the Western canon, for example in Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) or Thomas Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles (1891). Lacan’s reading of Poe’s story sees the holder of letter of the title as ‘exud[ing] the […] odor di femina’. 46 He argues that the letter – the content of which is never revealed to the reader – is a ‘pure-signifier’ and ‘by nature symbol only of absence’. 47 The unread letter is thus a signifier of feminine lack or absence. Lacan argues that a chain of triangulated intersubjective relationships is organized around the letter. In Bluets , Nelson and the receiver of the letter are involved in a love triangle with a third woman. 48 She is unhappy when she sees a photo of her lover with the other woman wearing the blue shirt he claimed to have worn especially for her on their last meeting. 49 Nelson is hurt by her own replaceability in this intersubjective relation. Her anger at the unread letter is an anger at being reduced to a lack in the male symbolic order. The loss of this letter signifies the failure of the female subject to be heard in male systems of communication. With the unread letter in the text Nelson both articulates an anxiety about the letter that is Bluets , but also challenges male psychoanalytic discourse that reduces feminine language to symbols and lacks. Through the form of the letter, Nelson resists the use of apostrophe. Addressing her writing to a reader who refuses to read it, but whom she intended to engage with it. Nevertheless, though the epistolary form is an attempt to subvert apostrophe, it here continues to be addressed to an unhearing, unreading other.

However, though it may not always succeed in conveying thought and feeling precisely to another, the act of writing structures thought. This sense of structure is found in the string of beads as they appear in ‘Experience’. Despite the multiplicity of, and distinction between, the perspectives that the beads suggest, there is a thread of continuity that runs through them. Emerson writes, ‘Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung’. This wire suggests some stable idea of identity and selfhood. Though moods may change, they have a vein of consistency running through them. This iron wire provides a strong yet flexible thread running through the centre of the beads. The sequential nature of the string of beads picks up the stair metaphor with which Emerson begins Experience’ and that we have already seen in the Introduction. In the stair metaphor, the subject seems to have vision beyond their current position; they stand atop their accumulated experience, upon which they can look down. However, Emerson describes a particular moment of becoming aware to this; ‘we’ are jolted into the realization of our position in a trajectory. The awareness of the past is only vague – ‘there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended [emphasis mine]’ – and the future remains unknown. Emerson thus suggests some sense of stable identity, though one that we are only occasionally aware of. The figure suddenly alert to their position on the stair occupies the same space as the figure on the mountain who realizes she can only see from her own situation. However, it is only a momentary realization, instead the subject is usually contained within their own ‘dream’ or ‘illusion’.

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times – now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river – how could either of us tell the difference? 51

Nelson describes the way in which disparate perspectives or viewpoints are fashioned into a linear, seemingly free-flowing narrative. The finished text imposes narrative structure onto the experiences being described. This leads to the diminishment of affect. Different moods are balanced by one another. Parsons argues that ‘ Bluets generates meaning through juxtaposition’. 52 The text is narrated in an almost detached, gestural mode and sense is made through the relationship between the different moments. Just as a photo album juxtaposes moments in a life, so too, does Bluets . The string of beads thus becomes a useful way of thinking about the way in which the self is narrativized; the subject can only perceive their experience as linear, but it is singular moments organized into a linear narrative. This is where the essayistic element of the lyric essay can be seen most prominently. The essay form also systematizes and organizes knowledge or ideas into a linear order, unlike a more traditionally poetic mode in which there is often unity and repetition in images and sounds. The form of Bluets structures thought. It both contains and organizes knowledge and subjectivity, but through this structuring it creates a distance from the affective experience described.

This ambivalence about affect is stereotypically Emersonian. In a highly influential departure from previous critical work on ‘Experience’, Sharon Cameron argues that the essay is an ‘impersonal’ text. 53 She shows that Emerson’s partial description of the effect of his son’s death on his world view represents the erasure of personal subjectivity. Bluets similarly mediates its representation of the personal through a certain detachment. It speaks from the self, but also analyses the self. Through the metaphor of the string of beads, both Emerson and Nelson collapse the subject with the object through the act of writing. In doing so, they both exalt the personal but simultaneously present it as a fiction that is produced through the text.

Author Biography

Georgia Walton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI). She works on American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L503848/1].

Maggie Nelson, ‘American Classics that Influenced the Writing of The Argonauts ’, Library of America (2015) < https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/660-maggie-nelson-american-classics-that-influenced-the-writing-of-_the-argonauts > [accessed 1 July 2021].

Boyer’s 2019 The Undying is part cancer memoir, part examination of the culture and systems that surround sickness and medical care in the USA. Rankine’s bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) combines elements of poetry, essays, and documentary in its portrayal of race relations in America. Laing’s The Lonely City (2017) draws on personal experience whilst also analysing representations of loneliness in visual art.

See the five articles included in ‘Dossier: The Argonauts as Queer Object’, Angelaki , 23:1 (2018) 187–213.

Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 30.

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 27.

Levine, p. 47.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in Collected Works , II, pp. 25–52 (p. 31).

Ibid., p. 33.

Ibid., p. 25.

Rachel Heffner-Burns et al., ‘The Year in Conferences—2020’, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture , 67:1 (2021), 279–348 (p. 346).

John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, ‘New Terrain: The Lyric Essay’, Seneca Review , 72:1 (1997), 7–8.

See Laura Di Summa Koop, ‘Critical Autobiography: A New Genre?’ Journal of Aesthetics & Culture , 9:1 (2017), 1–12.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2009), p. 41.

See Joe Parson’s ‘Walking with a Purpose: The Essay in Contemporary Nonfiction’, Textual Practice , 32:8 (2018), 1277–99 and Corrina Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, New Writing , 16:1 (2019), 100–15.

Bluets , p. 6.

It was the popularity of The Argonauts on both sides of the Atlantic that led to the reissue of Bluets in the UK and a general rise in critical interest in Nelson’s earlier works.

Alexandra Parsons, ‘A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman’s Chroma and Maggie Nelson's Bluets ’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , 33:2 (2018), 375–93.

Katie Collins, ‘The Morbidity of Maternity: Radical Receptivity in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts ’, Criticism , 61:3 (2019), 311–34 (pp. 312, 314).

Bluets , p. 1.

In 1986 the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) noted that ‘the fastest growing creative writing programs are in nonfiction’; Mary Rose, Associated Writing Programs, Telephone Conversation (2 November 2000), quoted by Douglas Hesse, ‘The Place of Creative Nonfiction’, in Creative Nonfiction , a special issue of College English 65:3 (2003), 237–41 (p. 238).

Ned Stuckey-French, ‘Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present , ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 293–312.

D’Agata and Tall, p. 7.

Jonathan Culler, The Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 5.

Bluets , pp. 30–31.

Ibid., p. 31.

Parsons, p. 384.

Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.

Joseph Urbas, ‘How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 31:4 (2017), 557–574.

Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Collected Works I, pp. 7–45 (p. 10).

Emerson, ‘Circles’, in Collected Works, II, pp. 177–90 (p. 182), quoted in Bluets , p. 94.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia , trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 201–18 (p. 205).

Bluets , p. 30.

Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Ibid., p. 34.

Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe’, Diacritics , 7:4 (1977), 59–69 (p. 68).

Denis Flannery, ‘Absence, Resistance and Visitable Pasts: David Bowie, Todd Haynes, Henry James’, Continuum , 31:4 (2017), 542–51 (p. 549).

Tom F. Wright, ‘Carlyle, Emerson and the Voiced Essay’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 206–22.

Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, p. 103.

Bluets , p. 71.

Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in The Purloined Poe (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28–54, p. 48.

Ibid., pp. 32, 39.

A love triangle is also the subject of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.

Bluets , p. 46.

Bluets , p. 77.

Ibid., p. 74.

Parsons, p. 385.

Sharon Cameron, ‘Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience”’, in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Illinois: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 53–78 (p. 53).

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Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying (FULL)

NOTE: This class is now full and we are no longer accepting registrations. Sorry! In the meantime, we invite you to check out our other offerings, sign up for our newsletter, and become a member to be the first to hear about newly added classes. ‍

What is a lyric essay? Is it a form, a genre, a quality of writing? These questions have confounded poets and essayists alike since the late 1990s, when the term “lyric essay” first made its debut in the pages of Seneca Review . Since then, writers have continued to blur the line between poetry and prose, writing powerful lyric essays that resist traditional ideas about what the essay can do and be.

In this 6-week workshop, Zoë Bossiere, coeditor of the new anthology, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) will guide writers through approaches to crafting lyric essays that play with content, style, design, and form. These interactive sessions include analysis of contemporary lyric essays, generative prompts with dedicated in-class writing time, and an opportunity to share written work with other writers. ‍ --- Details: Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying meets Tuesdays March 5, March 12, March 19, March 26, April 2, and April 9 from 6:30-8:30pm remotely online via Zoom. Prerequisites : None Genre : Nonfiction Level : All levels Format : Generative workshop with writing in class and outside of class and group sharing. Location : This class takes place in person remotely online via Zoom. Size : Limited to 12 participants (including scholarships). Suggested Sequence : Follow this class with another generative nonfiction writing workshop or a feedback course. Scholarships : Two scholarship spots are available for this class for writers in Northeast Ohio. Apply by December 11. Cancellations & Refunds : Cancel at least 48 hours in advance of the first class meeting to receive a full refund. Email [email protected] .

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Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins . Bossiere's debut book, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir , is forthcoming in May 2024 from Abrams Books. Learn more at zoebossiere.com

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Scene and Being Seen in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction (FULL)

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The Lyric Essay as Resistance

Truth from the margins.

Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold Wayne State University Press ($24.99)

by Garin Cycholl

The personal essay continues to assume new ranges of shapes and impulses. “Essay” turns as both verb and noun—a point of departure that ultimately takes as its subject that most fictional of all creations, an “I.” Over recent decades, the hybrid that John D’Agata originally tabbed as “lyric essay” has offered writers new means of inhabiting that “I.” As D’Agata put it in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay (Seneca Review Books, 2015), this genre’s “beautiful, gangly breadth” recenters or disrupts our place in the world. This dislocation is the starting point of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins , a recent anthology edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold.

Rhetorically at play, the lyric essay offers a space between “telling” and “being told.” As Bossiere views it, “To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.” Somewhere between these spaces, an “I” emerges, as Trabold finds it, in “the road blocks and potholes and detours—those gaps, the words left unspoken on the page . . . as important as the essay’s destination.” These powerful essays recognize the fragmented subjectivities that develop within the fits and starts of language itself, stories caught in media res , and words truncated in speech and memory. On these pages, voices develop within a range of subjects—personal maelstrom and adopted celibacy, bodies redefined in the sharp barbs of racism or the ambiguities of gendered experience. “I’s” stranded in time and memory, written into life via lyric essays, accrue towards “voice.”

The writers follow phantoms and rumors, hints of selves that have inhabited or passed through the world. They negotiate pages written across time. Molly McCully Brown addresses a series of fragments to “ Dear Frances, Dear Franny, Dear F, Dear Sister, Dear Ghost .” In “Whens,” Chloe Garcia Roberts narrates her “own birth story . . . one that is not [her] mother’s to tell.” Jennifer Cheng writes, “I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me. . . . the strange ambiguous homesickness I have known in the hollow cavity of my stomach every now and then since childhood.” Lyric offers a means of approaching what can be described or named amidst that “ambiguity.” Within this split, Melissa Febos recognizes, “I have not only strayed from the self I was before, but been changed. . . . My past self is a stranger, an imposter who inhabited my life for two years.” The challenge is to give that self a “voice.”

In a core essay, Danielle Geller engages Navajo words through a series of footnotes and recollections, attempting to find a way of speaking and writing a subjectivity shaped by language’s loss. Responding to a Navajo word for “Is it true?”, Geller writes, “The answer is, in many ways, unknowable. For our mothers, the surest protection from the past was to spin truths and falsehoods into one story, one thread, impossible to distinguish in the weave.” An “I” emerges from narrative’s warp and woof here, the threads left dangling or tugged into speaking. In this piece’s exploration, sometimes the lyric is more attendant to silence than any “I” speaking in place. The lyric essay offers a space to explore these entangled truths. Shook loose, this collection’s voices haunt, know, and speak in their persistence.

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“Tip of the Tongue”

Poetry & lyrics challenge.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re challenging you—yes, YOU, o budding poet!—to express yourself with an original short poem. Poetry can be intimidating, so we’ve created a challenge you can do even if you’ve never written a poem before! Through April 25, we’ll be publishing our favorite submissions on this page. Check back here each day to see if we’ve featured your poem!

The Challenge

We want you to write a poem that involves a feeling we’ve all experienced: when the right word is just out of reach, either because it’s on the tip of your tongue, or you’re completely blanking on it, or it simply doesn’t exist yet. Then we want you to make up a word to fill the void! There are just two simple parameters: 1. Your poem must have at least 2 lines, but no more than 5. 2. It must end with one completely made-up word—made up by you!

As long as it meets these criteria, it can be any kind of poem: couplet, haiku, song lyrics, hip-hop bars, limerick, unrhymed free verse—all forms of poetry are welcome! To help get you started, we’ve provided some examples .

A piano smashed into the ground.  It made the most incredible sound.  I tried to think of a word  To describe what I heard  But the closest I got was “GWEEOUND!”

Rhyming quatrain

My dog is a very weird boy.  He prances and acts really pompous.  He runs diagonally when he chases his toy.   I think the right word to describe him is… “doggywampus.” 

The word escapes me For pining for the present Perhaps “newstalgia”?

Walking, talking, and then the flash  Memes, theme songs, and all kinds of trash  Hits me all at once, brings me to my knees  And then it’s gone. It’s called a “ brain sneeze. ”

Submission Form

Challenge: Write a poem that involves having a word on the tip of your tongue, but then making one up instead.

1. Your poem must have at least 2 lines, but no more than 5. 2. It must end with one completely made-up word—made up by you!

Featured Submissions

It's something like a this and not a that, Its sound is bliss, its meter pitter-pat, And yet I miss the thing I'm aiming at! My words have gone, and who knows where they went? They've left my brain in deep embarglement.

It’s longer than a skwink, But takes less time than a chorkel. There’s no name for it, I think, So I’ll christen it a skwirkle!

The thought door locks, ahh! Allow the word to escape— Ohhh, the languetip!

I can sing if I write; I can write if I try. Yet try as I might, my mind's inkwell runs dry. To try and describe the resplendence descried, that beautiful word forth brought: intuilight.

Examples & Inspiration

The last day to submit is April 25. To participate, you must be 18 years of age or older.

Wednesday, April 17

–Patrick Phelan

– Jeanette Trefle

– Faith Paterson

The word I wanted was there I swear Now evanescent A wisp of memory Like cotton candy at a childhood meadowfair

– Curt Frye

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A Q&A with May/June 2024 Lyric Contest Winner Susan Rose Simms

“ Look Before You Leave ”

Written by Susan Rose Simms

Interview by American Songwriter

Susan Rose Simms scored 1st place in the May/June 2024 American Songwriter Lyric Contest for her song “Look Before You Leave.” American Songwriter caught up with Simms to get the scoop on the inspiration behind the lyrics and other musings.

What made you decide to enter the American Songwriter’s Lyric Contest?

I saw a notice on Facebook, and since I grew up with the “It never hurts to ask” attitude, I thought it also never hurts to try. You can’t ever win if you don’t at least try.

How did you feel when you learned you won?

I was SO excited. My brain couldn’t even sort out what I was feeling. My face was flushed and I’m sure I didn’t say anything relatively coherent. It was so validating. I often question my ability. I wonder if something is good or not and I wrote this song by myself—I usually co-write—so it was even more fulfilling.

What was the inspiration for your submission? Why did you want to write it?

Honestly, I’m a word person. I love puns and sayings. So, when I was thinking about some common sayings and idioms, “Look before you leap” came into my mind. I wondered if I could write a song around it, changing the word “leap” to “leave.” And I did.

What’s the story behind the song “Look Before You Leave”?

What I mentioned above. I thought, “What could I write around that saying?” Then I thought about what it means: you shouldn’t just act out without thinking. You should look around and think about what you’ve had and what you can still have. You have to consider the consequences of your actions and cherish the love you have and the love for your family.

Have you written music for this lyric? If so, how would you describe it?

Yes, I have. It’s kind of slow and flowing, and I hope there’s some “longing” and positive vibes in it.

How long have you been writing lyrics?

I’ve been writing lyrics since around 1996. It started when a relationship went south—I know—so cliché. I didn’t know what to do with all my feelings, frustration and my sadness. I joined a group of songwriters, and we started doing some cowrites. I’ve learned A LOT since then. I’m mostly a children’s book writer now but I still enjoy writing lyrics.

Since 1984, American Songwriter’s Lyric Contest has helped aspiring songwriters get noticed and have fun. Enter the 2024 Lyric Contest today before the deadline:

What keeps you motivated as a songwriter?

My heart. I have friends who are songwriters, and they keep me motivated. We bounce ideas back and forth, and hopefully, a song will come out of it. I grew up in a musical family. My stepsister is a professional singer, and my late mother and stepfather were both singers. I feel I’m carrying on the family legacy in my way.

Who are your all-time favorite songwriters and why?

Well, Dolly Parton of course. Her songs are real, with so much feeling behind them. She’s a wonderful storyteller. I like Billy Joel. Alanis Morisette’s songs are so different and quirky. Probably my first influence was Steve Seskin and “Life’s a Dance.” Honestly, there are too many to list.

What’s next for you?

I’ll continue writing. I can’t imagine a day where writing won’t be important for me. I need to write. It’s such a part of me. I have a few children’s books coming out, so I’ll be working on those, and I hope to write another song. Or two.

What would you tell other songwriters who are considering entering the Lyric Contest?

“It never hurts to ask,” or in this case, “enter.” Do it. If you have any doubts or you don’t think you have a chance, guess what…neither did I. And it happened. It’s so easy, and the rewards personally and professionally are the best prize! THANK YOU, American Songwriter. You have given me more than you know.

The post A Q&A with May/June 2024 Lyric Contest Winner Susan Rose Simms appeared first on American Songwriter .

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METROPOLITAN DIARY

‘I Opened the Book App on My Tablet and Began Reading’

Bonding over Homer on the 1 train, giving a dashboard gift and more reader tales of New York City in this week’s Metropolitan Diary.

Dear Diary:

I got on the last car of an uptown No. 1 train at Columbus Circle on a midweek evening. Squeezing into a seat next to a tall man, I opened the book app on my tablet and began reading where I had left off earlier.

“Are you reading ‘The Iliad’ on the subway?” the tall man asked in a tone of slight disbelief.

I said yes and explained that it was the Emily Wilson translation of Homer’s epic, which had recently been released to great acclaim.

“But how did you know what I was reading?” I asked.

“I saw a few of the names,” he said. “It couldn’t be anything else.”

“I’m a hopeless monoglot,” I told him. “Do you know it in the original?”

He nodded. “I had three years of Homer in graduate school.”

“Really? Do you have any left now?”

He cocked his head and quoted the opening lines, the ancient tongue sounding as smooth as flowing water.

I laughed out loud at the beauty of it, and at the unlikelihood of hearing ancient Greek spoken on the subway.

We exchanged a few other comments, and then I settled back in to read.

The man rose to leave at 110th Street.

“Thanks for reaffirming my love of Homer,” he said.

I couldn’t get my response out until he was halfway out of the car.

“Thanks for reaffirming my love for New York City,” I said.

— Gil Reavill

Dashboard Delight

I was driving down Broadway and I stopped at a red light.

A sanitation truck pulled up next to me. The driver leaned out of the truck and pointed at the large hula dancer figurine on my dashboard.

“Hey,” he said. “That’s awesome.”

I yanked it off the dashboard and tossed it to him.

— Kevin O’Keefe

I was walking on Sixth Avenue in Midtown listening to music with my headphones on. The Talking Heads song “Heaven” was playing, and I was whistling along.

Suddenly, I thought I heard the lyrics coming from outside the headphones. Listening more carefully, I was sure I heard the lyrics coming from outside the headphones.

For a second, I thought I was losing my mind. Then I glanced to my right and noticed a man walking alongside me and singing. He had clearly recognized the song I was whistling and had joined in.

Seeing that I had noticed him singing along with me, he smiled and walked away.

— Joseph O’Sullivan

Allerton Avenue

I was a girl going to summer camp for the first time. My mother, my sister and I boarded the train at Allerton Avenue in the Bronx to go to the drop-off point.

Getting on the train at the same time was a young, professional woman who, we learned, worked in pediatric recreation at Bellevue Hospital and adored children.

My new friend, Sadie Brown, had the magic touch. In no time at all, I was swinging my legs, jumping up and down and telling her my whole life story.

Later, I sent her a postcard from camp. She replied by sending me my first special delivery letter on beautiful, little-girl stationery. I have it to this day.

“I like children of all ages,” she wrote, “and your smile was so magnetic, I felt that I would like to get to know you.” She signed the letter, “Your Train Mate.” I was hooked.

From that day forward, Sadie and I remained faithful train mates until she died over 50 years later. She was my special friend, teacher and mentor through constant correspondence, phone calls and visits through the years.

I visited her in Florida the year before she died and wrote a memorial of our lifelong “train mate” friendship that was read at her funeral service.

“This is New York,” I can hear Sadie saying now. “You never know who you’ll sit next to on the train!”

— Fran Quittel

How Many Slices?

I was sitting near the front door at Barney Greengrass on Amsterdam Avenue near 86th Street. I was waiting for some colleagues I was meeting for breakfast.

Then the phone rang. A balding man who answered listened to the caller briefly and then shouted across the store to a white-haired man who was behind the opposite counter.

“How many slices in a cheesecake?” the balding man asked.

“As many as you want,” the white-haired man replied immediately. “It could be three! It could be 12! It could be 16!”

The balding man smiled and put the phone back near his mouth.

“Sixteen slices,” he said.

— Stuart Bernstein

Read all recent entries and our submissions guidelines . Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter.

Illustrations by Agnes Lee

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002 Lyric Essay Example Collection Of Solutions Examples Epic ~ Thatsnotus

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COMMENTS

Where to publish your lyric essays
Birdcoat Quarterly is an online journal featuring lyric essays (up to 5000 words), poetry and original art. All work accepted is also considered for their biannual print anthology. They charge a $3 submissions fee and pay $20 per poem and $25 per essay. The editors generally respond within a couple of months.
The Lyric Essay: Examples and Writing Techniques
Emilia Phillips' lyric essay " Lodge " does exactly this, letting the story's form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions. 2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language. The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it.
Submissions
We're open to all types of creative nonfiction, from immersion reportage to lyric essay to memoir and personal essays. Our editors tend to gravitate toward submissions structured around narratives, but we're always happy to be surprised by work that breaks outside this general mold. Above all, we're interested in writing that blends style with substance […]
An Insider's Guide to Writing the Perfect Lyrical Essay
As the name might suggest, the lyrical essay or the lyric essay is a literary hybrid, combining features of poetry, essay, and often memoir.The lyrical essay is a form of creative non-fiction that has become more popular over the last decade.. There has been much written about what lyrical essays are and aren't, and many writers have strong opinions about them, either declaring them ...
Writing From the Margins: On the Origins and Development of the Lyric Essay
While the origins of the lyric essay predate its naming, the most well-known attempt to categorize the form came in 1997, when writers John D'Agata and Deborah Tall, coeditors of Seneca Review, noticed a "new" genre in the submission queue—not quite poetry, but neither quite narrative. This form-between-forms seemed to ignore the ...
A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn
1. Draft a "braided essay," like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart. Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker. It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, "Ever since my ...
What Is a Lyric Essay in Writing?
A lyric essay uses many poetic tools to convey creative nonfiction. These tools can (but don't necessarily have to) include autobiography, figurative language, and sonic devices employed by many poets. ( List of poetic forms for poets .) A lyric essay may be written in prose paragraphs at one point and switch over to poetic stanzas at another ...
Submit Your Work
We warmly welcome your submission of original or translated writing: poetry, short story and flash fiction, conventional and lyric essay, cross-genre writing, text and image. We also publish photo essays. Editors are people who help writers improve their work for publication. The literary world is dense with publishers, not editors.
Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play
Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage. In this first week, we'll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.
An Introduction to the Lyric Essay
A quick definition of the term "lyric essay" is that it's a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem. Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it's simply ...
Submitting to Literary Magazines
This means that you should not submit four poems when the magazine only accepts three, submit a PDF when the magazine asks for a Word doc, or submit your fiction to the nonfiction category. Similarly, do not send in a 2,500-word essay when the journal asks for a 2,400-word maximum.
Submission Guidelines
Submit all pieces as a single .doc or .docx file, with page breaks in-between each piece, and titles clearly marked. Creative Nonfiction: Lyric essays, montage, serial essays, narrative journalism, and many other sub-genres of creative nonfiction. Limit 15 pages of creative nonfiction per author, with any number of titles included.
Sing, Circle, Leap: Tracing the Movements of the American Lyric Essay
Though the lyric essay is a wild, changeable beast, attempts have been made to contain it. In the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, Randon Billings Noble attempts to outline the lyric essay. The lyric essay, she states, is "a piece of writing with a visible/stand-out/unusual structure that explores/forecasts ...
Submissions
Submissions Schedule We publish two issues a year, September 1 and March 1. ... Segmented. Lyric. Essays written in a bowl of alphabet soup. Surprise us. Play with form and content. If you hybridize some poetry and nonfiction, send it our way. Submit a single piece of no more than 4,000 words or up to 3 flash essays of less than 1,000 words ...
Seneca Review: Lyric Essay
With its Fall 1997 issue, Seneca Review began to publish what we've chosen to call the lyric essay. The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of ...
If We're Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay
by Anna Leahy. March 9, 2021. "Suppose you want to write, in prose, about a slippery subject that refuses definition. Something like water, or the color blue. Like the word 'lyric,' or the word 'essay,'" posits fiction writer Amy Bonnaffons in an essay about essays for The Essay Review. Suppose I want to do just that, as others have ...
Tupelo Quarterly Submission Manager
Thank you for visiting our submissions portal. Tupelo Quarterly accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, lyric essay, hybrid work and visual art during open reading periods. Please read the guidelines for each category carefully. If no categories appear, that means the reading period is closed. Simultaneous submissions are welcome as long as you notify us immediately at the ...
The Beautiful, Untrue Things of the Lyric Essay
Consider Wilde's four basic doctrines: 1. Art never expresses anything but itself. 2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature. 3. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. 4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
Submissions
Please submit no more than one piece per category, per submission window. Be sure to double-space your work and save it in Times New Roman, 12-point font. (If font choices are important to your piece, however, please include what works.) Submit your work in a .doc or .docx file and please do not include your name in the file title or your last ...
Birdcoat Quarterly Submission Manager
Submit to Essays (Nonfiction) Please send one lyric essay of up to 5,000 words. We welcome submissions that blur genre and play with form, experiment with compression or expansion, use language in surprising ways, and bring attention to subject matter of contemporary urgency or uncommon interest.
Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson's Bluets
The lyric essay is a sub-genre or offshoot of the term creative non-fiction and both are a product of the creative writing courses and writing workshops in American universities that grew exponentially in the late twentieth century. 20 Ned Stuckey-French argues that the term lyric essay was coined in reaction to the idea that essays present ...
Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying (FULL
These interactive sessions include analysis of contemporary lyric essays, generative prompts with dedicated in-class writing time, and an opportunity to share written work with other writers.‍---Details: Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying meets Tuesdays March 5, March 12, March 19, March 26, April 2, and April 9 ...
The Lyric Essay as Resistance
Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold. Wayne State University Press ($24.99) by Garin Cycholl. The personal essay continues to assume new ranges of shapes and impulses. "Essay" turns as both verb and noun—a point of departure that ultimately takes as its subject that most fictional of all creations, an "I.".
"Tip of the Tongue" Poetry & Lyrics Challenge
Submit yours now! "Tip of the Tongue" Poetry & Lyrics Challenge. To celebrate National Poetry Month, we're challenging you—yes, YOU, o budding poet!—to express yourself with an original short poem. Poetry can be intimidating, so we've created a challenge you can do even if you've never written a poem before!
A Q&A with May/June 2024 Lyric Contest Winner Susan Rose Simms
Susan Rose Simms scored 1st place in the May/June 2024 American Songwriter Lyric Contest for her song "Look Before You Leave." American Songwriter caught up with Simms to get the scoop on the ...
'I Opened the Book App on My Tablet and Began Reading'
Dear Diary: I got on the last car of an uptown No. 1 train at Columbus Circle on a midweek evening. Squeezing into a seat next to a tall man, I opened the book app on my tablet and began reading ...
Call for Submissions: Jessie O'Kelly Student Essay Contest
The Program in Rhetoric and Composition invites students to submit to the Jessie O'Kelly Student Essay Award, which recognizes University of Arkansas undergraduate students for writing exemplary papers in first-year Composition courses during the 2023 calendar year. The award's monetary prize is $500. Submissions are due April 30, 2024.
Adeel Mangi: Why are Democrats letting Islamophobia sabotage a key
Instead, they're allowing Islamophobia to sabotage the judicial nomination of a highly qualified candidate: Adeel Mangi, an attorney from New Jersey, who, if confirmed, would become the first ...
The Supreme Court's conservatives just took direct aim at Jack Smith's
The Supreme Court's decision will have major implications for Trump: Two of the four charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president's Jan. 6 prosecution revolve around ...
Is Alex Garland's Civil War brilliant or vapid?
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Where to publish your lyric essays

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What is a lyric essay?

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

Personal essay example

Lyric essay example

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric Essay Examples

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

1. Start with your narrative

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

3. Investigate and braid different threads

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

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Writing From the Margins: On the Origins and Development of the Lyric Essay

Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold

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Ling Ling Huang on the Similarities Between Classical Music and Fiction Writing

Literary Hub

A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

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Submitting to Literary Magazines

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

WHAT DO I SUBMIT?

WHERE DO I SUBMIT?

HOW DO I KNOW IF MY WORK IS A GOOD FIT?

WILL MY WORK BE ACCEPTED?

WHAT CAN I DO TO MAXIMIZE MY CHANCES OF BEING PUBLISHED?

CONTESTS VS. GENERAL SUBMISSIONS

HOW DO I SUBMIT?

COVER LETTER + EXAMPLE

BIOGRAPHY + EXAMPLE

I SUBMITTED! NOW WHAT?

REJECTION LETTERS: TWO TYPES + EXAMPLES

DEALING WITH REJECTION

ACCEPTANCE LETTERS: YOU’RE IN! WHAT’S NEXT?

EXAMPLE ACCEPTANCE LETTER

CLOSING THOUGHTS

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

REFERENCES

Submissions

A Note on Our Aesthetic

Practical Matters

Genre Specifics

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

A Journal of The Literary Arts