A Conversation Between Heidi Czerwiec and Erica Trabold
In the descriptions of panels at the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Conferences, “lyric” was a word used for poetry and sentences and graphics, and briefly as a style of essay a panel of essayists might employ. In 2023, three panels were dedicated to just lyric essays, including new lyric essay anthologies. How far the form (or function?) has come in five years–once relegated to the fringes of nonfiction, lyric essays are fully within the margins, even if we are not sure what those margins are or if that is a good thing.
One of these new books on lyric essays is Heidi Czerwiec‘s Crafting the Lyric Essay (Bloomsbury 2024). Intrigued by Heidi’s lyric craft essay about the lyric essay in A Harp in Stars edited by Randon Billings Noble, I reached out to Heidi about an interview about her new book and the slippery form that is the lyric essay. In thinking about who might interview Heidi, I turned to Erica Trabold, one of the editors of The Lyric Essay As Resistance (Wayne State University Press 2023).
In the style of true lyric essayists, Heidi and Erica turned the form of an interview on its head, with a mutual interview that began with Erica asking a question, and Heidi answering it and letting the conversation lead to a question back. – Kristina Gaddy
Erica Trabold: Do you remember the first lyric essay you ever came across? What about the form reeled you in and made you want to try it yourself?
Heidi Czerwiec: The first one I encountered as a labeled lyric essay was Nicole Walker’s “Fish.” She and I both studied poetry in grad school together at the University of Utah. Years later, my poems had grown from short lyrics into pages-long musings, and discovering her early moves into prose made it seem possible for me, too—gave me permission. Because I had already been trained in all those lyric strategies, it seemed clear to me that, when moving into prose, I needed to pay more rigorous attention to language to maintain the lyricism.
But the first I ever came across, without really knowing what it was, was Annie Dillard’s slim volume Holy the Firm. I went through an Annie Dillard phase in college, but that book in particular continued to resonate in my head: the refrains of “The god of today is…,” and the echoes across sections of a figure afire—the moth in the candle, the girl who survives a small plane crash but is badly burned, the anchorite aflame with faith. The book is labeled with the categories Nonfiction, Nature, and Philosophy—it seems like the publisher didn’t know what to do with it—but retroactively it seems like a book-length lyric essay. Which brings me to my question for you:
Do you think it matters what a written work is labeled as, either while writing or reading? Does it affect how we read it? For instance, Diane Seuss’s [I hoisted them, two drug dealers] appears in frank: sonnets, which won several awards for poetry, yet first appeared in Brevity Magazine: Concise Literary Nonfiction. What’s at stake in the naming?
ET: It’s funny that you ask because I read your latest book Crafting the Lyric Essay (CtLE) out of order, and in your table of contents, I was first drawn to the craft essay “Useful Distinctions, or, Why the Lyric Essay Is a Function, Not a Form.” I think about names and definitions so often, and this essay gets to the heart of that discussion. In my experience, our conversations about writing often stagnate when we get hung up on categories. In many workshops, over many years, I’ve had to endure listening to the tired debate about “what a lyric essay even is” while the words I’d actually written got little to no airtime. It’s not that categories aren’t useful—and you write about this—it’s that, beyond what they are called or how they are defined, there are so much more interesting discussions to have about the lyric function and what lyric essays can do.
That’s the kind of expansive dialogue every writer wants to have about their work. But the way you approach this question is interesting. Ultimately, I think naming can help us see what we’re looking at, and it can also help us see the writer behind the words. Just as I would never question another person’s pronouns or name, I would never question who a writer tells me they are or what a piece of their writing is meant to be doing. I try to be a generous reader, one who understands that our relationships to names, definitions, and categories can and do change over time. Maybe that’s what Seuss was trying to communicate through her decisions, or maybe it was the marketing department’s call. Either way, it seems like the larger publishing industry is finally embracing the lyric essay. The shelf space for anthologies, craft, and textbooks is widening at a rapid pace—it’s exciting!
What do you think has led to the abundance of new work about the lyric essay in recent years?
HC: Yes, it is exciting! However, I’m going to push back on “the abundance” a bit. At the end of the fantastic recent anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance (tLEaR) that you and Zoë Bossiere edited, you have a “Further Reading” list; when my CtLE was coming out, I published a reading list of lyric essay craft and criticism in Assay. Our lists are 3–4 pages long, and there’s a lot of overlap. As Joanna Eleftheriou observes in “Is Genre Ever New?” Deborah Tall’s naming of the lyric essay made it possible to theorize about it, and as a result, most of the writing about the lyric essay is recent. But when you think about the centuries, even millennia, of craft and criticism about narrative and poetics, the work available on the lyric essay is sorely lacking. Even the work on creative nonfiction is lagging behind, and the bulk of it mostly comes from applying narrative, journalism, and rhetorical theory and techniques.
That’s a huge reason why I wrote CtLE—it seemed like the “lyric” part of lyric essay was being misunderstood, and that applying lyric theory and strategies to nonfiction helped to explain what these lyric essayists (many of them also poets) were doing on the page, but hardly anyone was doing that, and not in a sustained way. So Karen Babine made me do it. I’m guessing that’s what led to all the recent work—a dissatisfaction with what little is there, and an attempt to…not exactly define the lyric essay, but to describe and present it more usefully. In fact, in that essay you cite from my book, I’m arguing with some of the wording Randon Billings Noble uses in her intro to A Harp in the Stars, but I love that book, and I thank her in the Acknowledgments in mine. I’m so grateful for the people who are on those lists we assembled, for trying to put some foundational work out there, so that we can build on that, and I fully expect and hope that others will argue with my book and keep moving the conversation forward. In the spirit of expanding that conversation, and bowing deeply to the work your anthology is doing, my next question for you is this:
You quote bell hooks in the intro to TLEaR in order to flip our perspective: that the margins, rather than a disempowering position, “nourishes one’s capacity to resist.” Why do you think it is that the most exciting lyric essay work is being written by those from the margins? And do you think the lyric essay at this point can even be conceptualized apart from identity and/or politics?
ET: In order to write from a place of marginality, a writer has to be bold, confident, and unafraid—that’s a hugely important undertaking. As a reader, I’m energized by work with a strong voice that surprises or challenges me, and in our current moment, I think so many of us are searching for counternarratives, something, anything that reassures us that resistance is still possible. Perhaps, we could conceptualize the lyric essay apart from identity or politics, but I’m not sure I want to do that. I don’t think that is the kind of work we’re most hungry for right now. Lyric essays that embrace the author’s marginality are performing important functions on and off the page, widening the field for what we can write about, who can offer those perspectives, and most importantly, why. The deeper Zoë and I got into our project, the more we realized that every lyric essay we read was enacting resistance in some way, whether in form or content or both. It’s inescapable, which we find wonderful. The power of marginality is a core idea we want to impart to readers of our anthology, many of whom we imagine to be students.
How did you envision your book being used as a teaching tool, and how has that changed now that the book is out there in classrooms?
HC: Creative nonfiction pedagogy is important to me, and as I said earlier, I wanted to write craft and criticism that would help fill the lack of available scholarship, and that would be useful in the classroom. Several of the essays in the book were originally published online, because my intent was to make them accessible—and I know a lot of people have taught them, which was my hope, and for which I’m grateful. In collecting them into a book, I had to include unpublished material, so I tried to fill in the gaps—in terms of topics and, since several topics are covered by a more traditional craft essay or else a lyric craft essay that enacts the strategy it’s describing, writing a “paired” essay that fulfilled either the traditional or lyric craft aspect, so students could access those strategies a couple of ways. And the traditional craft essays include analyses of several pieces—same as you prioritized, lyric essays by authors writing from the margins of race, class, ability, gender—all available online, and for which I provide the URLs in the “Suggested Reading List” at the end.
My idea was that, for many of the topics, instructors using the book in the classroom would have a choice of what kind of craft essay to use: traditional deep-dive craft essay with the examples available for reading alongside (probably for more advanced students), just the lyric craft essays that describe strategies as they’re doing them (weird but fun!), or both paired together. There are also a few unpaired pedagogical essays that could provide exercises, like how to write about smell or how to use verse forms to structure short lyric prose. I also hoped that the book might become a resource for graduate students putting together reading lists—both in itself, and in the references it’s collated (including TLEaR, which had just come out as I was doing final edits!).
I’ve had enthusiastic responses from readers so far, but it’s still early to see how it will functionally be used in teaching (which I hate, because I’m impatient—insert Veruca Salt meme). At the very least, I hope it provides a more foundational alternative to all the creative nonfiction pedagogy coming from a narrative/journalistic perspective, so students drawn to it will have something to wield during those tired, dismissive debates. I also hope they’ll come back and debate with me!
But in looking to the future—future students, writers, readers of the lyric essay—what excites you most? What are you looking forward to writing? To reading?
ET: My favorite part of writing and reading is being surprised. That makes it difficult to make any predictions about where the genre’s headed… I really want to be surprised by its trajectory! But I think if we continue to encourage work that surprises, delights, and challenges us as readers, we’re doing our job as members of the lyric essay community. I see myself as a steward of this space, and the work is to make sure it remains safe for experimentation and evolution.
How about you, Heidi? What are you looking forward to when it comes to lyric essays?
HC: I agree with you about encouraging and stewarding the space for lyric essays to evolve. I’m excited that it’s mainly the work at the “margins” that’s being recognized as the most innovative, and can’t wait to see where it goes next. I’m also looking forward to where the craft discussions will go. Like I said earlier, there just hasn’t been much, and therefore not that much to build off of or push against—I was so grateful for Randon’s work even though I didn’t always agree with it, just because it provided grounds for conversation, and I hope for and expect and welcome everyone coming for me. Please, bring it! Or, write your own that covers all the stuff I’m sure I missed!
I’m also currently finishing co-editing The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay with Lee Ann Roripaugh, and we made a conscious choice to *not* include several foundational lyric essay writers who have written well-known craft essays, in favor of expanding the conversation to include as many new perspectives as possible—some of whom appear in your anthology as well, but I’m also glad there’s not too much overlap, so that this space keeps exponentially growing! The topics and approaches they’ve covered are often astonishing—so much of it surprised and delighted and challenged me, in the way you described—and I’m wiggling in my seat to share that collection. Like you, I feel honored to have had these opportunities to steward these discussions, and I’m thrilled you and I could have this discussion here—I’m a fan of your big brain, and am always up for nerding out over hybrid genres!
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Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, the poetry collection Conjoining (2017), and the lyric essay collection Fluid States, which was winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. She is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015) and editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
Erica Trabold is an assistant professor at Sweet Briar College, editor of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, author of Five Plots, and recipient of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.
