8-Week: Lyric Essay

This course studies lyric essays––essays that break from traditional form by experimenting with musicality, interdisciplinarity, poetry, myth, speculation, fragmentation, association, criticism, multimedia, research, and more––and they do so because the idea, or content, demands an innovative structure. We will discuss excerpts of work by Alejandro Zambra, Grace Paley, Claudia Rankine, Victoria Chang, Eula Biss, Toni Morrison, and more, and explore these works for inspiration in generative exercises that will support us in finding the form and style for our own narratives, especially when the stories we need to tell are disrupted by absences caused by memory or archive gaps, spiritual or transcendent experiences, violence and trauma, family silences, immigration and displacement, colonial erasures, ecological loss, emotional overwhelm, or simply the ineffability of life. We will think about cultural practices that upend Western assumptions of narrative and the ways that experimental approaches create space for social critiques and personal/political and ecological entanglements. Meetings will include craft lectures, generative exercises, informal first-blush feedback, discussion, as well as mini-readings of works in progress in the last two weeks.