Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec’s Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord
Crafting the Lyric Essay isn’t dogmatic about genre boundaries, though. Czerwiec writes, “I’ve tried to amass in this book the discussions taking place, creative nonfiction is still fairly theory-less, still in its early stages.” Crafting the Lyric Essay, then, is intended to open the conversation, to urge it beyond the The Next American Essay series and towards “having a shared language to discuss these distinctions.” It’s very successful at this, as in the process of reading we experience two aspects of the craft, and two ways of understanding it: one more theoretical and one more experiential.
