Crafting the Lyric Essay

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

Introduction
1. Consider the Lobster Mushroom: being a brief theory of the craft of creative nonfiction
2. Success in Circuit: Lyric Essay as Labyrinth
3. A Jump to the Left, and Then a Step to the Right: On Lateral Moves in the Lyric Essay
4. Mind the Gap: Writing Around Absence
5. Negative Capability: On White Space in the Lyric Essay
6. Fragmentation Grenade: The Violence of Hybridity
7. A Dash of Dash: The Lyric Art of Punctuation
8. Permissive Sieves
9. Strike a Chord: The Lyre That Makes the Lyric
10. The Resonance of Lyric Essays, or Lyre, Not Liar
11. Using Poetic Forms in Nonfiction
12. R(E)volution Pantoum: Play with Your Food
13. The Four Temperaments of Creative Nonfiction
14. Revisiting Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm
15. Ekphragrance
16. Watching Sausage Made: The Focus on Craft in Recent Creative Nonfiction Anthologies
Epilogue: Recital
Suggested Readings
Bibliography
Index