Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec’s Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord
In Heidi Czerwiec’s wonderful Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord (Bloomsbury; March 2024), I found a whole education on the topic of what we could mean when we talk about lyric essays. It’s a genre that has been growing now for over 20 years, but the term “lyric essay” could still be used to describe a nonfiction piece with any or all of the following: pretty writing, hybrid form, heavy use of imagery, more associative (less rigidly narrative) in mode, use of white space, and so on.
But is a beautifully written essay automatically a lyric essay? Does any nonfiction prose work that is experimental or unconventional count as a lyric essay? Is every miscellaneous, messy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink essay also a lyric essay, or can we identify stricter formal concerns? As Czerwiec writes, “Lyric thinking, composed of these patterns, may shape itself into various forms, but ultimately, the lyric essay is a structure of thinking, a way of functioning on the page and in the ear, not a form.” Crafting the Lyric Essay serves as a kind of hybrid craft book and anthology of the lyric essay, and I can’t recommend it enough.
