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Writing From the Margins: On the Origins and Development of the Lyric Essay

Zoë bossiere and erica trabold consider essay writing as resistance.

Once, the lyric essay did not have a name.

Or, it was called by many names. More a quality of writing than a category, the form lived for centuries in the private zuihitsu journals of Japanese court ladies, the melodic folktales told by marketplace troubadours, and the subversive prose poems penned by the European romantics.

Before I came to lyric essays, I came to writing. When my teacher asked the class to write a story for homework , I couldn’t believe my luck. But in response to my first attempt, she wrote in the margins: this is cliché .

As a first-generation college student, I was afraid I didn’t know how to tell a story properly, that my mind didn’t work that way. That I didn’t belong in a college classroom, wasn’t a real writer.

And yet, language pulled me. Alone in my dorm room, I arranged and rearranged words, whispered them aloud until the cadences pleased me, their smooth sounds like prayers. I had no name for what I was writing then, but it felt like a style I could call my own.

While the origins of the lyric essay predate its naming, the most well-known attempt to categorize the form came in 1997, when writers John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, coeditors of Seneca Review , noticed a “new” genre in the submission queue—not quite poetry, but neither quite narrative.

This form-between-forms seemed to ignore the conventions of prose writing—such as a linear chronology, narrative, and plot—in favor of embracing more liminal styles, moving by association rather than story, dancing around unspoken truths, devolving into a swirling series of digressions.

D’Agata and Tall’s proposed term for this kind of writing, “the lyric essay,” stuck, and in the ensuing decade the word would be adopted by many essayists to describe the kind of writing they do.

As a genderfluid writer and as a writing teacher, I’ve always appreciated the lyric essay as a literary beacon amid turbulent narrative waves. A means to cast light on negative space, to illuminate subjects that defy the conventions of traditional essay writing.

Introducing this writing style to students is among my favorite course units. Semester after semester, the students most drawn to the lyric essay tend to be those who enter the classroom from the margins, whose perspectives are least likely to be included on course reading lists.

Since its naming, the lyric essay has existed in an almost paradoxical space, at once celebrated for its unique characteristics while also relegated to the margins of creative nonfiction. Perhaps because of this contradiction, much of the conversation about the lyric essay—the definition of what it is and does, where it fits on the spectrum of nonfiction and poetry, whether it has a place in literary journals and in the creative writing classroom—remains unsettled, extending into the present.

I thought getting accepted into a graduate program meant I had finally opened the gilded, solid oak doors of academia—a place no one in my family, not a parent, an aunt or uncle, a sibling or cousin, had ever seen the other side of.

But at my cohort’s first meeting in a state a thousand miles from home, I understood I was still on the outside of something.

“Are you sure you write lyric essays?” the other writers asked. “What does that even mean?”

The acceptance of the lyric form seems to depend largely on who is writing it. The essays that tend to thrive in dominant-culture spaces like academia and publishing are often written by writers who already occupy those spaces. This may be part of why, despite its expansive nature, many of the most widely-anthologized, widely-read, and widely-taught lyric essays represent a narrow range of perspectives: most often, those of the center.

To name the lyric essay—to name anything—is to construct rules about what an essay called “lyric” should look like on the page, should examine in its prose, even who it should be written by. But this categorization has its uses, too.

Much like when a person openly identifies as queer , identifying an essayistic style as “lyric” provides a blueprint for others on the margins to name their experiences—a form through which to speak their truths.

The center is, by definition, a limited perspective, capable of viewing only itself.

In “Marginality as a Site of Resistance,” bell hooks positions the margins not as a state “one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays on, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.”

To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.

I graduated with a manuscript of lyric essays, one that coalesced into my first book. That book went on to win a prize judged by John D’Agata and named for Deborah Tall. I had finally found my footing, unlocked that proverbial door. But skepticism followed me in.

On my book tour, I was invited to read at my alma mater alongside another writer whose nonfiction tackled pressing social issues with urgency, empathy, and wit. I read an essay about home and friendship, about being young and the hard lessons of growing up.

After the reading, we fielded a Q&A. The Dean of my former college raised his hand.

“I can see what work the other writer is doing quite clearly,” he said to me. “But what exactly is the point of yours?”

Writing is never a neutral act. Although a rallying slogan from a different era and cause, the maxim “the personal is political” still applies to the important work writers do when they speak truth to power, call attention to injustice, and advocate for social change.

Because the lyric essay is fluid, able to occupy both marginal and center spaces, it is a form uniquely suited to telling stories on the writer’s terms, without losing sight of where the writer comes from, and the audiences they are writing toward.

When we tell the stories of our lives—especially when those stories challenge assumptions about who we are—it is an act of resistance.

Many of the contemporary LGBTQIA+ essayists I teach in my classes write lyrical prose to capture queer experience on the page. Their works reckon with nonbinary family building and parenthood, the ghosts of trans Midwestern origin, coming of age in a queer Black body, the over- whelming epidemic of transmisogyny and gendered violence.

The lyric essay is an ideal container for these stories, each a unique prism reflecting the ambiguous, messy, and ever-evolving processes through which we as queer people come to understand ourselves.

Lyric essays rarely stop to provide directions, instead mapping the reader on a journey into the writer’s world, toward an unknown end. Along the way, the reader learns to interpret the signs, begins to understand that the road blocks and potholes and detours—those gaps, the words left unspoken on the page—are as important as the essay’s destination.

The lyric essays that have taught me the most as a writer never showed their full hand. Each became its own puzzle, with secrets to unlock. When the text on a page was obscured, the essay taught me to fill in the blanks. When the conflict didn’t resolve, I realized irresolution might be its truest end. When the segments of the essay seemed unconnected, I learned to read between the lines.

The most powerful lyric essays reclaim silence from the silencers, becoming a space of agency for writers whose experiences are routinely questioned, flattened, or appropriated.

Readers from the margins, those who have themselves been silenced, recognize the game.

The twenty contemporary lyric essays in this volume embody resistance through content, style, design, and form, representing of a broad spectrum of experiences that illustrate how identities can intersect, conflict, and even resist one another. Together, they provide a dynamic example of the lyric essay’s range of expression while showcasing some of the most visionary contemporary essayists writing in the form today.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins , edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold. Copyright © 2023. Available from Wayne State University Press.

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In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark. 

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.” 

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

• Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
• Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
• Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

• An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
• Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
• An unobstructed flow of ideas.
• Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
• Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
• Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

I’m interested in learning about essays to write my memoir, so I shall be back.

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The Lyric Essay as Resistance

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Truth from the Margins

Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold

• 9780814349601
• Publication Date: March 2023
• Description

Resistance and representation manifests in the subversive genre of the lyric essay.

Winner of the Midwest Book Award!

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of the best lyric essays published in the last several years by prominent and emerging writers. Editors Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold situate this anthology within the ongoing work of resistance—to genre convention, literary tradition, and the confines of dominant-culture spaces. As sites of resistance, these essays are diverse and include investigations into deeply personal and political topics such as queer and trans identity, the American BIPOC experience, reproductive justice, belonging, grief, and more.

The lyric essay is always surprising; it is bold, unbound, and free. This collection highlights the lyric essay's natural capacity for representation and resistance and celebrates the form as a subversive genre that offers a mode of expression for marginalized voices. The Lyric Essay as Resistance features contemporary work by essayists including Melissa Febos, Wendy S. Walters, Torrey Peters, Jenny Boully, Crystal Wilkinson, Elissa Washuta, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and many more. Their work demonstrates the power of the lyric essay to bring about change, both on the page and in our communities.

Zoë Bossiere is a genderfluid writer from Tucson, Arizona. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and coeditor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity. Erica Trabold is an assistant professor at Sweet Briar College, author of Five Plots , and recipient of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.

" The view from the literary 'margins' has never looked as inspiring or as invigorating as it does in this collection of blazing bold voices that are pumping blood into the essay's very heart. " ~John D’Agata, Author of about a Mountain

" This important and exciting anthology reveals how lyric essays can be both marginal and central, experimental yet sure, fluid and sound, haunted by ghosts but by beauty too. The Lyric Essay as Resistance is a gorgeous showcase of what the lyric essay can do. " ~Randon Billings Noble, Editor of a Harp in the Stars: an Anthology of Lyric Essays

" I can easily see this fine anthology included in any of the courses I teach. The twenty essays herein do the triple-duty work of modeling the lyric form, expanding the platform for said form, and challenging the form to stretch so it can accommodate new, and necessary, literary voices. " ~Elena Passarello, Author of Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses

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A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

Poets can learn a lot from blurring genres. Whether getting inspiration from fiction proves effective in building characters or song-writing provides a musical tone, poetry intersects with a broader literary landscape. This shines through especially in lyric essays, a form that has inspired articles from the Poetry Foundation and Purdue Writing Lab , as well as become the concept for a 2015 anthology titled We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay.  

Put simply, the lyric essay is a hybrid, creative nonfiction form that combines the rich figurative language of poetry with the longer-form analysis and narrative of essay or memoir. Oftentimes, it emerges as a way to explore a big-picture idea with both imagery and rigor. These four examples provide an introduction to the writing style, as well as spotlight tips for creating your own.

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker . It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” This first line not only immediately propels the reader into Zauner’s grief, but it also reveals an example of the popular “braided essay” technique, which weaves together two distinct but somehow related experiences. 

Throughout the work, Zauner establishes a parallel between her and her mother’s relationship and traditional Korean food. “You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup,” Zauner writes, illuminating the deeply personal and mystifying experience of grieving through direct, sensory imagery.

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

Lyric essays blend poetic qualities and nonfiction qualities. Hadara Bar-Nadav illustrates this experimental nature in Selections from Babyland , a multi-part lyric essay that delves into experiences with infertility. Though Bar-Nadav’s writing throughout this piece showcases rhythmic anaphora—a definite poetic skill—it also plays with nonfiction forms not typically seen in poetry, including bullet points and a multiple-choice list. 

For example, when recounting unsolicited advice from others, Bar-Nadav presents their dialogue in the following way:

I heard about this great _____________.

a. acupuncturist

b. chiropractor

d. shamanic healer

e. orthodontist ( can straighter teeth really make me pregnant ?)

This unexpected visual approach feels reminiscent of an article or quiz—both popular nonfiction forms—and adds dimension and white space to the lyric essay.

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych , and her work has also appeared in an anthology of the best flash nonfiction. Her essay “Some Sort of Union,” published in Hippocampus Magazine , was a finalist in the magazine’s Best Creative Nonfiction contest. 

Since lyric essays are typically longer and more free verse than poems, they can be a way to address a larger idea or broader time period. Boutsikaris does this in “Some Sort of Union,” where the speaker drifts from an interaction with a romantic interest to her childhood. 

“They were neighbors, the girl and the air force paramedic. She could have seen his front door from her high-rise window if her window faced west rather than east,” Boutsikaris describes. “When she first met him two weeks ago, she’d been wearing all white, buying a wedge of cheap brie at the corner market.”

In the very next paragraph, Boutskiras shifts this perspective and timeline, writing, “The girl’s mother had been angry with her when she was a child. She had needed something from the girl that the girl did not know how to give. Not the way her mother hoped she would.”

As this example reveals, examining different perspectives and timelines within a lyric essay can flesh out a broader understanding of who a character is.

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

Like any other form of writing, lyric essays benefit from in-depth research. And while journalistic or scientific details can sometimes throw off the concise ecosystem and syntax of a poem, the lyric essay has room for this sprawling information.

In “What Fullness Is,” award-winning writer Roxane Gay contextualizes her own ideas and experiences with weight loss surgery through the history and culture surrounding the procedure. 

“The first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain,” Gay details. “He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was taken to Córdoba, where a doctor sewed his lips shut. Only able to drink through a straw, the former king lost enough weight after a time to return home and reclaim his kingdom.”

“The notion that thinness—and the attempt to force the fat body toward a state of culturally mandated discipline—begets great rewards is centuries old.”

Researching and knowing this history empowers Gay to make a strong central point in her essay.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of the techniques above to emulate in your own take on the lyric essay. Happy writing!

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Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

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Essays come in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms: they can be the five paragraph essays you wrote in school — maybe for or against gun control or on symbolism in The Great Gatsby . Essays can be personal narratives or argumentative pieces that appear on blogs or as newspaper editorials. They can be funny takes on modern life or works of literary criticism. They can even be book-length instead of short. Essays can be so many things!

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “lyric essay” and are wondering what that means. I’m here to help.

What is the Lyric Essay?

A quick definition of the term “lyric essay” is that it’s a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem.

Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it’s simply that in poetry the line breaks matter, and in prose they don’t. That’s it! So the lyric essay is prose, meaning where the line breaks fall doesn’t matter, but it has other similarities to what you find in poems.

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Lyric essays have what we call “poetic” prose. This kind of prose draws attention to its own use of language. Lyric essays set out to create certain effects with words, often, although not necessarily, aiming to create beauty. They are often condensed in the way poetry is, communicating depth and complexity in few words. Chances are, you will take your time reading them, to fully absorb what they are trying to say. They may be more suggestive than argumentative and communicate multiple meanings, maybe even contradictory ones.

Lyric essays often have lots of white space on their pages, as poems do. Sometimes they use the space of the page in creative ways, arranging chunks of text differently than regular paragraphs, or using only part of the page, for example. They sometimes include photos, drawings, documents, or other images to add to (or have some other relationship to) the meaning of the words.

Lyric essays can be about any subject. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. They can be philosophical or about nature or history or culture, or any combination of these things. What distinguishes them from other essays, which can also be about any subject, is their heightened attention to language. Also, they tend to deemphasize argument and carefully-researched explanations of the kind you find in expository essays . Lyric essays can argue and use research, but they are more likely to explore and suggest than explain and defend.

Now, you may be familiar with the term “ prose poem .” Even if you’re not, the term “prose poem” might sound exactly like what I’m describing here: a mix of poetry and prose. Prose poems are poetic pieces of writing without line breaks. So what is the difference between the lyric essay and the prose poem?

Honestly, I’m not sure. You could call some pieces of writing either term and both would be accurate. My sense, though, is that if you put prose and poetry on a continuum, with prose on one end and poetry on the other, and with prose poetry and the lyric essay somewhere in the middle, the prose poem would be closer to the poetry side and the lyric essay closer to the prose side.

Some pieces of writing just defy categorization, however. In the end, I think it’s best to call a work what the author wants it to be called, if it’s possible to determine what that is. If not, take your best guess.

Four Examples of the Lyric Essay

Below are some examples of my favorite lyric essays. The best way to learn about a genre is to read in it, after all, so consider giving one of these books a try!

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen counts as a lyric essay, but I want to highlight her lesser-known 2004 work. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence from the perspective of post-9/11 America. It combines words and images, particularly television images, to ponder our relationship to media and culture. Rankine writes in short sections, surrounded by lots of white space, that are personal, meditative, beautiful, and achingly sad.

Calamities by Renee Gladman

Calamities is a collection of lyric essays exploring language, imagination, and the writing life. All of the pieces, up until the last 14, open with “I began the day…” and then describe what she is thinking and experiencing as a writer, teacher, thinker, and person in the world. Many of the essays are straightforward, while some become dreamlike and poetic. The last 14 essays are the “calamities” of the title. Together, the essays capture the artistic mind at work, processing experience and slowly turning it into writing.

The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

The Self Unstable is a collection of short essays — or are they prose poems? — each about the length of a paragraph, one per page. Gabbert’s sentences read like aphorisms. They are short and declarative, and part of the fun of the book is thinking about how the ideas fit together. The essays are divided into sections with titles such as “The Self is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” The book is sharp, surprising, and delightful.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. Maggie Nelson’s subjects are many and include the color blue, in which she finds so much interest and meaning it will take your breath away. It’s also about suffering: she writes about a friend who became a quadriplegic after an accident, and she tells about her heartbreak after a difficult break-up. Bluets is meditative and philosophical, vulnerable and personal. It’s gorgeous, a book lovers of The Argonauts shouldn’t miss.

It’s probably no surprise that all of these books are published by small presses. Lyric essays are weird and genre-defying enough that the big publishers generally avoid them. This is just one more reason, among many, to read small presses!

If you’re looking for more essay recommendations, check out our list of 100 must-read essay collections and these 25 great essays you can read online for free .

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23 The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation

• Published: October 2022
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This chapter asks what it means to label an essay ‘lyric’, and it makes a case for why the lyric essay is both distinct and essential in the nonfiction canon. Though the term ‘lyric essay’ has been in wide circulation for over twenty years, not unlike the larger genre of the essay itself, the subgenre has had a complicated and sometimes contentious history. The chapter begins with the history of the term ‘lyric essay’, locating it in both lyric poetry and the traditional essay traditions. It ascribes a series of formal qualities and conventions to lyric essays: a move towards poetic rather than fictional techniques; juxtaposition and association in lieu of direct denotation; and the use of form to mirror and inform content. Finally, offering a range of textual examples, the chapter argues for the lyric essay as particularly generative of truth-telling when there are complex and fragmented situations; when there are gaps in knowledge, memory or experience; and when the reader’s perceptions, rather than the writer’s, must be centered.

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• The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins

In this Book

• Edited by Zoe Bossiere and Erica Trabold
• Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Table of Contents

• pp. vii-viii
• Introduction
• Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold
• Apocalypse Logic
• Elissa Washuta
• A Meditation on Grief: Things We Carry, Things We Remember
• Crystal Wilkinson
• The Story You Never Tell
• Chelsea Biondolillo
• Words First Seen in Print in 1987, According to Merriam-Webster
• Krys Malcolm Belc
• Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
• Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
• Aisha Sabatini Sloan
• Architectural Survey Form: 902 Sunset Strip
• Camellia-Berry Grass
• Hea-Ream Lee
• Fragments, Never Sent
• Molly—McCully Brown
• Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
• pp. 103-106
• The Little Girl, Her Drunk Bastard Parents, and the Hummingbird
• Jessica Lind Peterson
• pp. 107-116
• As If to Say
• Michael Torres
• pp. 117-128
• Lyzette Wanzer
• pp. 129-134
• Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb, Or All the Shadows That Carry Us
• Jennifer S. Cheng
• pp. 135-142
• Chloe Garcia Roberts
• pp. 143-150
• Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay
• Torrey Peters
• pp. 151-156
• Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary
• Danielle Geller
• pp. 157-166
• Jenny Boully
• pp. 167-170
• The Dry Season: Spring 2016
• Melissa Febos
• pp. 171-190
• Watercourses
• Wendy S. Walters
• pp. 191-200
• Acknowledgments
• pp. 201-204
• Further Reading
• pp. 205-210
• Contributors
• pp. 211-215
• About the Editors

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The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins Kindle Edition

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BCVW3VBR
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wayne State University Press (March 21, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 21, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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Where to publish your lyric essays

Since we teach a course on the lyric essay, we decided to put together a list of where to submit this hybrid form, which combines elements of essay, poetry and memoir. We looked for journals that either explicitly welcome lyric essays or that demonstrate an appreciation of the qualities that characterise the form, such as compression, attention to sound and use of poetic techniques. Almost all of the journals on our list also accept other forms of creative nonfiction, fiction and/or poetry (as highlighted below) so there’s a little something for pretty much everyone.

The list is ordered very roughly according to acceptance rate – from highest to lowest. Unless otherwise noted, these journals are OK with simultaneous submissions. If no submissions fee is noted, submissions are free (at least at the time of posting).

Note: We are a creative writing school and compile these lists for the benefit of our students. We’re happy to answer questions about our courses but please don’t send us your publishing queries or submissions :). Instead, click on the green links to go to the publication’s website and look for their submissions page. For more great places to submit as well as our best tips on getting published, check out our  other lists and resources .

Bending Genres publishes creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . As their name implies, they appreciate writing that blends genres and crosses creative lines. Send in your essays of up to 1500 words. They don’t accept simultaneous submissions but they make a decision quickly – generally in less than a week.

The Spotlong Review is a new online litmag founded in 2021 with a mission to champion innovative work that “packs a punch, questions conventional mores, and, most of all, explores human connection from surprising angles”. They accept essays, narrative nonfiction, fiction and poetry with a 5000 word limit for prose. They ask for 2 months to make a decision.

Eastern Iowa Review publishes essays, fiction and poetry online plus occasional print anthologies. Their favourite forms are the lyric essay and the prose poem. They want language that sings! The editors ask for 6 months to make a decision but often respond within a week or two. They are open to fiction submissions until 15 October 2021. Their window for nonfiction and poetry just closed 31 August but check back in a few months.

JMWW is a weekly online journal publishing creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . They prefer work under 3000 words and love “flash CNF, unusual forms, and deeply personal narratives”.  They generally get back very fast – in under a week.

X-R-A-Y is an online magazine of creative nonfiction and fiction . They love experimental work, preferably in their sweet spots of 500-1200 or 3000-6000 words. They ask for 60 days to make a decision but often take considerably fewer.

The Journal for Compressed Creative Arts is an online weekly dedicated to very short creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . The editors want to know what “compressed” means to you, but the prose pieces they publish are generally 600 words or fewer. Their submissions windows are 15 September – 15 December 15 & 15 March – 15 June. They pay $50 per accepted piece and generally respond very quickly – often in under a week.

Fourth Genre is a well-respected biannual print and online journal devoted to creative nonfiction. The editors are looking for works that are “lyrical, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as expository, analytical, exploratory, or whimsical”. They charge a $4 reading fee and have a single submissions window – from September through November. They generally reject within a couple of months but take longer to accept.

Birdcoat Quarterly is an online journal featuring lyric essays (up to 5000 words), poetry and original art. All work accepted is also considered for their biannual print anthology. They charge a $3 submissions fee and pay $20 per poem and $25 per essay. The editors generally respond within a couple of months.

Contrary Magazine is a quarterly online journal for creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . The nonfiction they accept “is often lyrical, narrative, or poetic”. They offer a token payment of $20 per issue. The editors ask for 90 days to make a decision – if you haven’t heard back within 90 days assume your work wasn’t a good fit.

phoebe is a 50-year old journal that has managed to stay cutting edge. They publish creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry in two issues per year – fall/winter in print and spring/summer online. They welcome lyric essays of under 4000 words, as well as other forms of creative nonfiction. Their submissions fee is $3 – you can send up to 3 flash pieces in a single submission. The editors generally make a decision within a couple of months. Note that the submission window for their fall/winter print issue closes 15 October 2021.

Salt Hill is a biannual print journal featuring top-notch creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry by established and emerging writers. For nonfiction they’re interested in work that “pushes the boundaries of the genre, making use of the techniques of fiction and poetry to tell a true story”. You can send in your essays (of up to 7500 words) year-round; they have set submissions periods for fiction and poetry. The editors aim to make a decision within 6 months and often manage in fewer.

Gulf Coast is a biannual print journal of creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry . It was founded by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate in 1986. Their word limit for prose is 7000 words. They charge a $3 submissions fee and pay $50 per page for accepted work. The editors ask for 6 months to make a decision and often succeed in considerably fewer.

Pank , co-founded by Roxane Gay, publishes online quarterly and in print annually. They accept fiction and poetry as well as creative nonfiction and are looking for fresh, innovative work of up to 7500 words. They offer limited windows for free submissions but the “tip jar” option ($5) is usually open. The editors tend to accept relatively fast – within a couple of months – and reject more slowly.

Brevity is a long-running online magazine devoted to the short-form essay – 750 words or fewer. The editors pride themselves on the magazine’s international scope and for offering opportunities to as yet unpublished writers. The editors are looking for the best of the best – and regularly publish heavy-hitters such as Roxane Gay and Sherman Alexie. Payment is $45 for accepted essays. They generally respond within 2 or 3 months.

Creative Nonfiction publishes true stories in many forms – everything from immersion reportage to personal essay to memoir – quarterly in print. They solicit work from established writers but also have regular calls for unsolicited submissions aimed at specific groups (e.g., writers over 60), subjects and types of CNF. Non-subscribers are charged a $3 reading fee. Be prepared for a long wait – response times of over a year are common.

Hippocampus exclusively publishes creative nonfiction. They are looking for flash (up to 800 words), personal essays and memoir excerpts (up to 4,000 words) for their 6 online issues per year. There are 2 regular submission windows (submissions fee $3): March through May and September through November, plus a submission-fee free period from December 1 through 23. They pay $40 per piece accepted. They aim to make a decision within 4 months but often take considerably longer.

Seneca Review is a biannual print poetry journal published by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. They have been promoting the lyric essay since 1997. They have two reading periods 1 February – 15 March and 1 September through 15 October. There’s a $3 charge for electronic submissions (submissions sent by post are free). Send in your lyric essays of up to 20 pages (around 5000 words) or 3 – 5 poems, just be prepared to wait a while for a response – they ask for 9 months to make a decision and sometimes take even longer.

5 responses on "Where to publish your lyric essays"

We want to read your stories!

I am establishing a micro-publishers called goatshedpress. We are going to be publishing high-quality, cutting edge chapbooks of collected writing. I would love to read your short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Contributors will receive free copies to sell/distribute, and an author bio both in the chapbook and on our website (still in development).

Email your writing to [email protected] and I will try my best to get back to you in under two weeks. Look forward to reading your work!

Can you put some free ones on here? Object to paying reading fees when I can’t buy frucerues with my words!

Groceries, I mean!

I personally appreciate your curating both online and print journals for us. Further, being a seasoned senior, you are compassionate as for limited resources, while at the same time knowing excellence has no age limit or careers targeted. Please continue to value input from those who can well add historical contexts to modern essays and poetry. For example, Millenials and Z Generation may gain valuable insights and wisdom from experience of older (nevertheless unpublished and unknown) fellow human beings. Memento Mori — we are mortal!

Really great list. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

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If We’re Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay

By anna leahy.

March 9, 2021

“Suppose you want to write, in prose, about a slippery subject that refuses definition. Something like water, or the color blue. Like the word ‘lyric,’ or the word ‘essay,’” posits fiction writer Amy Bonnaffons in an essay about essays for The Essay Review. Suppose I want to do just that, as others have wanted to do—and have done. The word essay is from Latin for driving something out; it sets in motion, or is the evidence of motion. The lyric essay is going somewhere. 

Bonnaffons continues, “The term ‘lyric essay’ brings poetry—[t]he highest of the literary arts—into the realm of nonfiction. The term ingeniously takes advantage of lyric’s double valence: 1) it definitely means poetic and 2) nobody can agree on what else it might mean.” 

Valence is a favorite word of mine because it means different things in different contexts. I’ve spun a poem around concepts of valence; it begins with an epigraph of definitions. 

Valence: in chemistry, atomic affinity; in biology, capacity to interact, to bind, to unite; in graph theory, the number of edges incident to a node; in ancient medicine, an extract, a potion; in politics, voting according to party competence; in psychology, the emotional value of an experience; in linguistics, the bonds a verb controls. 

Valence comes from Latin meaning to be strong; vale was used as a greeting. Welcome, listen, be strong. 

When I headed to an MFA program and even still, the common assumption seems to be that one must apply in a single genre, take workshops only in that genre, and write a thesis in that same genre, as I did in poetry. Not everyone wants to write in more than one genre, but why not? 

Beth Ann Fennelly has published three poetry collections and is Poet Laureate of Mississippi, but her latest book is a collection of micro-memoirs, and it’s not her first collection of nonfiction. Paisley Rekdal is the author of five poetry books and is Poet Laureate of Utah, but her newest book is an extended essay, and it’s not her first nonfiction book. All three of us went to MFA programs where nonfiction was not an option. So, we are poets in the position to bring the poetic to the realm of nonfiction. 

Poet Carl Phillips writes in the introduction to Yanyi’s collection The Year of Blue Water , “for all of the questing for stability, the fact that the self is ever changing includes an instability that deserves its own respect.” We are a sequence, and the lyric essay depends on it. But Phillips is writing about poetry. 

I name this kind of sequencing, this necessary human changeability: trajectory. 

The word trajectory comes from Latin meaning something thrown. It indicates not only direction in space but elapse of time: past, present, and future. Trajectory is the changing of position in time; it has momentum and dimension. We can see it or hear it—we can measure movement— because of context: time and space. In discrete mathematics, trajectory is a sequence that can be mapped. In engineering it is a collection of states of being in an unending operation, an instability that deserves its own respect. Trajectory might be understood as where and when, which are tangled within this essay as I keep moving along. Trajectory is the context for the I.  

While trajectory may look like a straight line, Earth’s gravity shapes the path of what is thrown through the air; the path is a curve. Trajectory may look like direction, but direction is the looking, and trajectory depends on motion, on momentum. The word momentum comes from Latin meaning the power to move. The word moment came later, when measuring instants of time became useful. 

No, that’s not true. A moment is not an instant. A moment is a minute; it’s something that takes time. An instant is a point in time but takes no time at all. An instant is a way of talking about time as if it were space. 

Physicist Werner Heisenberg thought a lot about the uncertainty of measuring both position and speed—space and time—at once. Trajectory cannot be fully known as it’s happening. The path can be seen in hindsight. Moreover, Heisenberg argued that when we conduct an experiment—like writing an essay?—some of the knowledge obtained by previous experiments is destroyed. 

Poet Louise Glück, in Proofs & Theories, writes of the unsaid and the unseen, the ellipses and the ruins: “Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.” The parts and the whole cannot be separated, according to Heisenberg. The whole is suggested by the shadow of parts, according to Glück. 

And in the time it takes to discern where I am in this instant, I’ve moved on. An instant cannot be measured; it implies the time and space around it, or vice versa. 

In one of his poems, Yanyi describes Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, which is what Nelson’s publisher calls “a genre-bending memoir,” which seems to be a way of saying lyric nonfiction in language that sells books. In an interview with The Atlas Review, Nelson describes her book as “an experiment with anecdote and lived theory.” I take this to mean that the writing rests on the experience of thinking as well as on thinking about experience. Or in the words of Bonnaffons,

“The lyric essay, with its associative logic and openness to visuality as a tool of meaning-making, may in fact be more suitable than other form for expressing embodied truths.” Associative logic— juxtaposition—is a habit of mind that bridges self and world. It embodies. 

Nelson also points to this associative quality: “I was trying to smoosh things together that aren’t always smooshed.” Yanyi writes of The Argonauts ,“It reads like time, powered by adjacency, auras burned with other auras, each making the other another center.” 

Time and adjacency is trajectory—then, there, now, here. The next-to, the brush-up-against, the smoosh. The Latin word for throw is iacere , which is also the root for both trajectory and adjacent.

Adjacency and momentum define each other; they create a multiplicity of centers. 

In another poem, Yanyi writes, “I walked because I liked the companionship in going nowhere together, the endlessness of being with another person.” Pico Iyer writes something similar in The Art of Stillness: “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere.” Yanyi likes adjacency; he likes timelessness. So does Iyer. Adjacency— surroundings, context, connection—allows for trajectory without going anywhere at all. Like spinning, like orbiting. 

Iyer is writing essays. Yanyi is not writing essays. Yanyi’s pieces are poems; the book won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. But how exactly are these writings not lyrics essays? Does each not take or fill enough space or time? 

Claudia Rankine is a poet. In college, she studied with Glück, an adjacency in the history of poetry. Rankine’s book Citizen is subtitled An American Lyric and was a finalist for the National Book

Critics Circle Award in two categories: poetry and criticism. It won in criticism. As poetry, it won the PEN Center USA and Los Angeles Times book awards. A review in The Guardian explained this confusion over whether Citizen is poetry or essay: “The power of Citizen is such that questions of literary form tend to be set aside. It’s described as a prose poem, but it’s not quite what Rimbaud or Francis Ponge might have understood by that. Where Symbolist and Modernist prose poems often exhibit an almost-intolerable density of suggestion, Rankine works by impeccable timing within the paragraph, with an even tone enforcing an implacable verbal economy and exactitude.” The paragraph is space and time, position and momentum, but verbal economy and exactitude sound like poetry. 

The word exactitude is from Latin referring precision or accuracy, as with measurement; it’s related to the Latin word for forcing something out. Citizen forces out a lot, personally and politically, emotionally and intellectually. 

In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes, “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant.” That’s how Rankine appeared to change the lyric essay: in an instant. But this was not her first American lyric. 

Rankine’s point is about patterns of racism and patterns of privilege. Citizen is about accumulation over time—the trajectory of instances. 

In Rankine’s first book, Nothing in Nature Is Private, the length and shape of each piece—the space it takes or fills on the page and time on the breath—is what is generally considered contemporary American poetry. She’s doing something different now, something that looks like an essay, that uses space and time like an essay. She has brought poetry to nonfiction. Is she a poet or an essayist? 

In an online symposium at Copper Nickel, three poets discussed their movement toward creative nonfiction. Shamala Gallagher opens by saying, “I began to write nonfiction out of frustration with my poetry.” While I have not faced what I would call frustration with my poetry, one of the benefits of working in both forms is that the range of possibilities limits the risk of writer’s block. There always exists another sort of thing to write. 

Not every idea fits every form. The lyric essay offers additional spaces—shapes, sizes, syntaxes—for a poet’s ideas. 

In that same conversation, James Allan Hall talks of being drawn to the essay’s capaciousness in contrast to the condensation of poetry. Don Bogen agrees, saying that essays give him “more room.” The poem and the essay are different kinds of room, and size—the amount of space—is part of that difference. Perhaps, writing poetry cultivates a particular awareness of and appreciation for the space of the lyric essay: dimensions, edges, room to breathe without catching the breath with a line break. 

Yanyi says something along these lines: “Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear.” He is talking about poems in his poem that reads like a tiny essay. A space is a space is a space. 

I studied Latin—beginning Latin—over and over, from high school through doctoral work. Only classics professors have conversations in Latin. It’s a dead language. But it’s here now, in trajectory, momentum, adjacent, syntax. 

By 2010, I had moved for a new job and still felt disoriented in my sunny surroundings with avant garde colleagues on one side and genre-fiction colleagues on the other. I started reading Joan Didion, in part because I hoped she would help me understand what it meant to be a woman writer in California. Though Didion’s style isn’t much like my own, I began writing what I thought of as responses to her work because, at the time, I wasn’t sure how to start an essay on a blank page. After all, I am a poet. 

I wrote my own versions of Didion’s “In Bed,” which is about her experience of migraine; “John Wayne: A Love Song,” which is about the actor; and “Marrying Absurd,” which is about a Las Vegas wedding she observes. I didn’t hide the influence; I highlighted the juxtaposition with Didion’s work. In hindsight, what I attempted was not imitation at all—I’m no Didion. Instead, these essays grapple with adjacency—my adjacency to Didion and her work’s adjacency to New Journalism, but also a variety of internal adjacencies in subject matter. 

In Bonnaffons’s terms, Didion’s work was my side entrance: “Maybe lyric slips through the side entrance; maybe it tunnels into the basement; maybe it parachutes onto the rook and slides down the chimney. Perhaps the lyric doesn’t enter, just presses its face against the window and longingly observes.” Didion’s essays were windows I pressed my face against to observe both my own thoughts and the world all at once. 

In a review of the recent documentary about Joan Didion, Brigid Delaney argues, Didion’s “fragmentary style […] renders an event closer to a form of poetry than the blunt instrument that is the inverted pyramid of news or even more conversational-style features.” The form is paragraphs, and the voice is journalistic, but Delaney seems to suggest that Didion makes her way through an essay’s paragraphs lyrically. 

In his essay “The Opposite of Cool,” Joshua Wolf Shenk says of Didion’s writing, “She darts onto it [the stage], and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off.” Is the lyric essay a space into which I can dart, say something, and then dart out again, perhaps leaving a section break if I want to dart back in? “It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience,” Shenk writes, “but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance.” The place between enticing proximity and blunt distance is the adjacent. It’s why the whole is stunning. 

Importantly, Shenk also points out that, though Didion writes in the first person, The Year of Magical Thinking is “not a memoir of grief. It is, quite explicitly, an essay about alienation from grief.” In hindsight, I realize this un-memoir way to write a personal essay was what attracted me to Didion’s writing. “On the page, Didion is the epitome of control, mastery, and clarity,” Shenk writes. “But this order seems to proceed from a chronic sense of meaninglessness, detachment, and distress.” Surrounded by an un-ordered world, control of form and language attracted me to poetry and then to the essay to create order in the mind and on the page. 

In “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion writes, “I tell you this neither in a spirit of self- revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” Perhaps through yours— yes, mine! The first John Wayne movie I saw was Sands of Iwo Jima, and I remember the buzz when he went public with his cancer diagnosis. Before reading Didion, I’d never considered writing about John Wayne, but it turned out that I had plenty to say, and Didion’s essay invited me to say it, not as self-revelation (even as I revealed myself) nor as total recall (even as I wove through researched detail) but, rather, to figure something out about the relationship between the parts and the whole of what’s happened—the where and when of the I . My essay is called “Strange Attraction: John Wayne and Me,” and it’s about John Wayne to some extent and also about the nuclear age and my father’s cancer. When I finished this essay in July 2010, I sent it in response to a call for an Americana issue at The Southern Review and nowhere else. Less than six weeks later, editor Jeanne Leiby accepted this piece. 

After that, the piece underwent fact-checking by Cara Blue Adams, which was an experience I hadn’t had as a poet and one that forced me to look at how the minutia of my essay mattered and fit together. Fact-checking seems about parts but is about the whole and its shadows. 

Accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to an existing value. The less margin for error, the more accurate. It’s hitting the mark. Accuracy comes from Latin meaning to do something carefully, so the word refers to the rightness, to the trueness, of what’s observed. 

Precision is different than accuracy. Precision refers to the reliability of the measurement. It means that if you measure the same phenomenon again, the value will be the same. It’s hitting the same mark again and again, but it might not be what you’re aiming for. If the result is not what you expected, that’s racked up to random error. Something done or said over and over isn’t necessarily right or true. But it can seem as real as anything else. 

Precision, then, might be considered internal consistency, a way to make one’s way through the essay or, for that matter, memoir. Accuracy allows the lyric essay to accept the value of facts—its connection to the world—even as it takes leaps that appear chaotic, even as it smooshes. These leaps leave room room for juxtaposition and the adjacent. 

Factual accuracy is a constraint I welcome as part and parcel to the essay form, just as I welcome constraints of syntax and grammar. Out of constraints, opportunities emerge. As soon as we write the first word, form the first paragraph, we are choosing constraints. 

In a group interview at Electric Lit, Edwidge Danticat expresses appreciation for fact- checkers: “Someone will always question your interpretation of things, but I like to get the factual things as right as possible and I feel a bit crushed—and somewhat ashamed—when I don’t.” I share Danticat’s stance, not out of moral certitude so much as out of aesthetic possibility. I lie or imagine something into being only if I am honest about it being a lie or a supposition. Writing is a process of selecting, including, and interpreting; there’s more outside the paragraphs. Honesty, then, is often more complicated than trickery. Honesty can be scarier and more fun when the reader is in on it too. 

The word honest comes from Latin meaning respected or decent, which is a way one can be perceived. The word trickery comes from Latin meaning a shuffling in order to be evasive, which is a shaping of others’ perception. 

Accuracy is a kind of protection. I have double-checked my records, for instance, to be sure of the submission and acceptance dates and numbers for the essays I’m discussing here. I didn’t remember timeframes accurately; I had told myself a different story of my trajectory by erasing lag times in my memory. When I look back, I can see that, when “Strange Attraction” was published, I stopped submitting the other two essays I’d written. 

Vulnerable comes from the Latin word for wounding, plucking, stretching. 

For a while, I told myself I had beginner’s luck. Or I happened to find the right editor or judge for a particular piece. Or I timed it right, when content matched a particular editorial hole, though I did not think, at the time, how the editors where my work appeared over the next several years were white. The word particular comes from Latin meaning something so tiny that it is even less significant than an actual part of something. 

And of course, I told myself that it must be easier to publish nonfiction than poetry—and why hadn’t anyone told me this before? 

In 2010, the year I sent out my John Wayne essay, I also sent “Half-Skull Days” (about my experience of migraine) and “Marrying Absurd: An Update” (about my own Las Vegas wedding). A big fell swoop, and then I stopped submitting them. 

All six outlets passed on “Half-Skull Days,” but I didn’t send it right back out after each rejection. More than a year later, I saw that an editor at The Pinch was looking for an essay to fill out an issue, so I sent it there and only there, where it was published and then listed as a Notable in The Best American Essays 2013. My point isn’t about success. 

Why did I let this essay lie fallow right after another essay had been published? Did I not trust the lyric essay as a thing to do—that I could do? And then, why did I bother sending it out again? What if I hadn’t seen that side entrance call for essays? And who is most likely to find the way in through the side door? 

From my initial round of submissions in 2010, my take on Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” was a finalist in a contest, which is the most encouraging form of rejection a writer can receive. And then I didn’t submit that piece again for five years, when I submitted it once at a time to seven outlets over eight months. And then “Marrying Absurd” won the creative nonfiction award from Ninth Letter, which feels like bragging to say. Confidence—or at least resilience and a good game face —was something I didn’t think I lacked until I looked back at my records. 

Confidence, from the Latin for trust. I had a sense of my path, but I’d misremembered the pace. Am I a poet or an essayist now? What determines the shape and speed of our writerly dreams? 

“I moved into nonfiction because that’s how things shook out,” Mary Mann tells E.B. Bartels in a multi-author interview at Electric Lit . Mann admits, “Maybe it was just the examples I had.” When I finally turned to nonfiction, I became absorbed intellectually by more types of essays, as had been the case with poetry years earlier. Bartels writes of Mann and others, “Almost every writer I interviewed told me that she first thought she was going to be a novelist. […] Instead, as you grow as a writer, nonfiction seems to choose you.” Bartels’s point is that those of us who write nonfiction don’t perceive it as a choice so much as necessary movement. 

This statement also reveals assumptions between what G. Thomas Couser, in Memoir: An Introduction, calls “the two sibling genres” of fiction and life-writing that “share a good deal in the way of technique.” Poetry seems left out of these shifts and comparisons. Yet Couser asserts, too, that “all literature is sometimes divided among these modes: lyric (expressive), narrative (storytelling), and dramatic (presentation through enactment).” When I headed to my MFA, I chose poetry (expressive) over fiction (narrative) because I was more fascinated by form than plot, not because I valued expression (or self-revelation) over storytelling. Form offers ways to shape space and time. That’s what drew me to poetry and then to the lyric essay. 

“Nonfiction feels like the only genre,” Elizabeth Greenwood tells Bartels. “I wish it were more of a decision!” Had I forced myself or been forced to pursue poetry? Was I really a nonfiction writer all along? Or was this path from poetry to an adjacent nonfiction the inevitable surprise? 

Greenwood surmises that nonfiction is an especially good fit for her because “I lived equally in my head as in the world.” Both poetry and nonfiction are equally in my head and in the world. To echo Greenwood’s words further, both poems and lyric essays offer “the luxury of following my curiosities.” Several years ago, an editor said of a short piece I’d written, “Any essay that can juggle both [the scientist Enrico] Fermi and [the childhood game] Mystery Date wins me over right away.” I enjoy seeing how many disparate somethings I can smoosh into a single essay—that is my way through. Adjacency enacted, in response to and as fuel for curiosity. 

[lyric essay = mind world]

Curiosity comes from two related Latin words, one meaning inquisitiveness and the other meaning careful, or diligent. 

Couser sees another distinctive quality of memoir that, to my mind, points to a similarity between poems and lyric essays: “memoir may also be structured entirely without reference to the passage of time.” Sven Birkerts, in The Art of Time in Memoir, puts it another way: “Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency.” Memoir—and I would argue the personal lyric essay too, as memoir-adjacent—can depend on the relationship between the mind and the world, on the interplay between what’s considered subjective and objective. 

While the craft of the personal lyric essay and memoir overlap, and while the range of creative nonfiction and the essay is wider and more varied than I’m discussing here, there’s something un-memoir about the lyric essay, too, something that undercuts or overshadows its I about-ness. something other than or in addition to self-revelation—an about-ness that is multiple. The lyric essay does not necessarily make the self the primary subject even when the self’s presence moves through the paragraphs. 

“The route is often associative,” the second paragraph of Citizen begins. 

In her book that is poetry and memoir and cultural criticism , Rankine uses the second person: you. 

Shawn Wen’s A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause: An Essay is a lyric biography of mime Marcel Marceau. Wen is not the subject; there exists no authorial I. Wen writes, “Time passes. It sputters and stretches. What matters is not the speed of light, but the speed of thought.” She describes Marcaeu’s power as a mime as a manipulation of time that’s akin to that of the lyric essayist: “The mime refashions time, sculpting it with a precision instrument. He can suspend or hasten it at will. He marches in place for three minutes and a lifetime has passed.” 

[lyric paragraph = space time] 

           ∴

[lyric essay = paragraph || paragraph || paragraph] 

The lyric essay prioritizes connection among this and this and this—then, there, now, here. Then, there, now, here—these are existing values for the lyric essay. Time and space serve as context for the self. 

In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses some external measures of her essays: “Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible.” She asserts, “I am an academic,” which comes with certain assumptions about what she is supposed to write and where she is supposed to publish. She points to “a fundamental misunderstanding of what I do.” The result is that her “ethnographies have too much structure and [her] sociology is a bit too loose with voice. A bit slutty it all is, really, jumping between forms and disciplines and audiences.” One value is ethnography, another is sociology, and she’s off the mark for each. She’s hitting a mark of her own making, the one she’s aiming for as “a black woman who thinks for a living.” 

Cottom goes on to say, “The essays in this volume dance along the line of the dreaded ‘first- person essay’.” But she isn’t trying to figure out how everything in the world is about her. Oh, the dreaded lyric essay, then. Her work is un-memoired and un-academic, and all the better for that double un-about-ness. 

All these constraints about who is supposed to write what—and how we label a piece of writing based on who’s written it—add up: “We [black women] have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movement theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us.” Not everyone takes the same path, and the same path doesn’t treat everyone the same way. Of the mind and of the world, Cottom describes herself as “few people’s idea of an intellectual, public or otherwise, and showing up anyway” to write essays. 

Maggie Nelson of The Argonauts talks of a similar issue in The Atlas Review, but her position is quite different than Cottom’s: “I’ve always written what I need and want to write, without thinking all that much about whether it’s personal or scholarly or esoteric or provocative or prose or poetry or whatever.” Such freedom of thought, of language! “I write about things that are typically coded as personal—the experience of having a body; of having sex, of having feelings, including ugly ones; anecdotes from my daily life; details about people I know and often love; and so on.” But she also says, “I don’t valorize the personal over the impersonal or the theoretical.” The self is not her only or primary subject matter. 

The personal and the theoretical, the subjective and the objective, memoir and research, biography and philosophy, emotion and intellect—it’s all possible in the lyric essay. Perhaps, it’s all necessary too. 

Birkerts suggests intuition of meaning emerged, for him, when “events and feelings […] arranged themselves into a perspective,” but he finds the word perspective, which is from Latin meaning to see through, too “fixed, even static.” Movement is necessary for lyric. 

The lyric essay occurs when the writer, in words borrowed from Birkerts, has “discerned the possibility of hidden patterns.” Likewise, in The Book of Delights, Ross Gay writes, “Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up.” Shortly thereafter, he writes of the route he walks home: “What compels us into such grooves, such patterns?” Wen (and Marceau) uses—sees, creates—patterns; scene descriptions recur, as do lists of items in various collections. Cottom’s ideas and conclusions emerge from patterns. 

Race is part of Cottom’s perspective, and the way events and feelings arrange themselves for her as a black woman. She always starts “by interrogating why me and not my grandmother?” Race is part of Gay’s perspective too: “Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind.

Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.” Like Nelson and Cottom, he writes of things typically coded as personal and plenty that’s of the world too. But each of us comes to the essay differently and are coded differently; position and speed vary. 

Race is part of Birkerts’s, Nelson’s, and Didion’s perspectives too—and mine as well. But as white writers, we are not often expected to acknowledge this. We should acknowledge it anyway. 

Patterns are iterations in and through space and time. They are instances; there exist things adjacent and implicit. The word pattern comes from the word patron, from Latin meaning defender, advocate, or model. Because the lyric essay discerns the possibility of hidden patterns, it is a model, a map of movement, a mockup of a trajectory of thought. It can be a way to defend, to advocate.

Why me? is not enough. Why me and not someone else? is a beginning. 

Braid: to draw a sword, to throw to the ground, to knit.

Prism: something sawed into pieces, something that throws light at angles. 

Mosaic: the work of the muses.

Web: something woven, like fabric.

Collage: something glued together. Both the parts and whole discernible. 

Hermit crab: a crustacean that uses an empty seashell for protection. 

Thank goodness I didn’t stop with Didion. I’d have gone only so far and not far enough. 

In “The School of Roots,” Hélène Cixous traces origins of and connections among words:

clean in English, immonde in French, immondus in Latin. She is considering about what is edible and what is abominable. A few pages later, she writes, “If I gather these beings to talk about them in the same way, if I am worried by the fate of birds and women, it is because I have learned that not many people—unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—can really love, tolerate, or understand a certain kind of writing; I am using women and birds as synonyms.” She is talking about hidden patterns and how she is not writing as others expect her to write—or to think. 

Her writing is a model of her thinking; it is of the mind. She is a philosopher, not a poet. 

No, that’s not quite right. In an interview with Kathleen O’Grady, Cixous calls her own work “philosophico-poetical,” adding, “my theoretical texts are carried off by poetical rhythm.” The word lyric is Latin referring to words sung to the music of a lyre, but I haven’t talked much about sound because others have written much about sound and lyric, especially in the context of poetry. I am talking about trajectory and patterns. 

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a book that opens with the story of her mother leaving her all her personal journals. The journals turn out to be blank. The title of this book is When Women Were Birds, so Cixous is not the only one to connect—somewhat arbitrarily, it turns out for both Cixous and Williams—the two creatures, women and birds. Ross Gay refers to Williams’s book in The Book of Delights, and I’ve referred to him in this essay. Cixous, Williams, and Gay are connected in my mind and now on the page. Is this enough adjacency? 

Those journals were white space. Of white space in essays, Bonnaffons says, “The white space might be read as the necessary separations between nodes of a network, or as intervals between distinct voices that together form a chord.” In an essay, meaning made of white spaces depends on the adjacent—the paragraphs—not on the blankness itself. 

In a different section of her essay, Bonnaffons points out, “Rankine’s book reminds us that whiteness is more like willful ignorance, disavowed knowledge. […] Citizen’ s spare blocks of prose on blinding-white paper serve to underline this notion: to force the reader to confront whiteness as a part of the text.” She also points to the “absence of writers of color” in a recent anthology of essays. The adjacent matters to the essay, and absence does not suffice in its place. 

On the next page of “The School of Roots,” Cixous is on to Ghandi. I’m not sure where she is or is going, but I know she’s somewhere and going somewhere. And soon she announces, “That is my theme for today: to be ‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy,” by which she means, “You no longer belong to the world.” You’re in the head. The un-ordered falls into place because she’s come back to those words for clean. She’s created an echo, a pattern. 

Writing, Cixous says, “is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. […] This does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently than our thinking and speech.” The lyric essay resists what Cixous calls “a huge concatenation of clichés,” yet works by a different concatenation, which is a word drawn from Latin meaning chained together. As Jane Hirshfield says in Nine Gates, though she is talking about a poem not an essay, it “begins in language awake to its own connections […]. It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.” In the physical and in the mental, in the world and in the head, in space and time. 

Hirshfield looks at origins and meanings, somewhat as Cixious does and as I have:

“Concentration’s essence is kinetic, and the dictionary shows the verb as moving in three directions,” namely toward a center, inward toward one’s own attention, and toward strength. Again, everything is moving, even if we’re not sure where it will end up or how long it will last. 

And yet concentration feels like stillness. 

“Sitting still,” Iyer suggests in The Art of Stillness, “as a way of falling in love with the world and everything it.” He posits, “Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.” The lyric essay depends on the world and the mind, on movement and paragraphs. 

Iyer also says, “So much of our lives takes place in our heads—in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation—that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.” Putting the world into words changes the thing I write about. And the thing itself changes the writing that embodies it. 

We’re going somewhere from here, from now, I’m sure of it. The trajectory of the lyric essay is the logic of movement and adjacency. We have a sense of where we are, but we can’t be sure until we’re somewhere else—and we don’t know exactly when we’ll get there.

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Daniel Abiva Hunt holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, The Masters Review, CRAFT, Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches and studies fiction.

Poetic Endings: Nailing Down the Threshold by Dia Calhoun and Deborah Bacharach

Deborah Bacharach (left photo) is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review and a mentor with PEN America. She lives in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Dia Calhoun (right photo) is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Nashville Review, The Writer’s Chronicle; EcoTheo Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize and taught creative writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com.

The Manananggal as Mythmaking by Melanie Manuel

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her BA from UC Davis in English and Asian American Studies and is currently attending SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She is a recipient of the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She is the Production Editor for PI Online and teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies department. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine and North American Review , and she has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3 .

Delightfully Weird by Tommy Dean

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

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Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay

What is a lyric essay? Lyric comes from the late sixteenth century: from French lyrique or Latin lyricus, from Greek lurikos, from lura ‘lyre.’

To the ear, “lyre” and “liar” sound the same, which I resist because I do not condone lying in essays, lyric or otherwise. But mythology tells us that the origins of the lyre come from a kind of lie.

Hermes, the gods’ messenger and something of a trickster, stole Apollo’s sacred cattle. Hermes tried to deny his theft but ultimately confessed. In atonement, he gave Apollo a new way to make music: the lyre. Later Apollo taught Orpheus how to play the lyre and Orpheus became the best musician and poet known to humankind. He charmed trees, rocks, and rivers. While sailing with the Argonauts he overpowered the Sirens with his songs, allowing the ship and its crew to pass safely on their quest to find the Golden Fleece. And when his wife died, he sang his way into the underworld to retrieve her. His music was so powerful it could almost—almost—raise the dead.

Lyric essays have the same power to soothe, to harrow, to persuade, to move, to raise, to rouse, to overcome.

Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has the responsibilities of any essay: to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking (however subtle). The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

I came to define a lyric essay as:

a piece of writing with a visible / stand-out / unusual structure that explores / forecasts / gestures to an idea in an unexpected way

But about that visible / stand-out / unusual structure, that unexpected idea: Lyric essays are tricky. If you try to mount one to a spreading board, it’s likely to dodge the pin and fly away. If you try to press one between two slides, it might find a way to ooze down your sleeve. And if you try to set it within a taxonomy, it will pose the same problems as the platypus—a mammal, but one that lays eggs; semiaquatic, living in both water and on land; and venomous, a trait that belongs mostly to reptiles and insects. It will run away if on land—its gait that of a furry alligator—or swim off in the undulating way of beavers. Either way it can threaten you with a poisoned spur before it ripples off.

Despite its resistance to categorization, there are four broad forms of the lyric essay that are worth trying to define:

Flash Essays

origin Middle English (in the sense ‘splash water about’): probably imitative; compare with flush and splash

I define flash essays as being one thousand words or fewer. They are short, sharp, and clarifying. The shortest ones illuminate a moment or a realization the way a flash of light can illuminate a scene. Longer ones may take a little more time but regardless of their length, the meaning of the essay resonates more strongly than its word count might suggest.

Lightning flashes, as do cameras, flares, signals, and explosions; all show a brief moment in a larger scene. A small syringe can deliver a powerful drug. A capsule can too—unless it dissolves in a glass of water to reveal a paper flower. Regardless of their content, flash essays are imitative of their form. They give the reader a splash of a moment and leave us flushed with emotion and meaning.

Segmented Essays

origin late sixteenth century (as a term in geometry): from Latin segmentum, from secare ‘to cut’

Segmented essays are divided into segments that might be numbered or titled or simply separated with a space break.

These spaces—white space, blank space—allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest each segment before moving on to the next. Each section may contain something new, but all still belong cogently to the whole.

Segmented essays are also known as

(origin late Middle English: from French, or from Latin fragmentum, from frangere ‘to break’)

(origin mid-nineteenth century: from Greek parataxis, from para- ‘beside’ + taxis ‘arrangement’; from tassein ‘arrange’)

(origin early twentieth century: from French, literally ‘gluing’)

(origin late Middle English: from French mosaïque, based on Latin musi(v)um ‘decoration with small square stones,’ perhaps ultimately from Greek mousa ‘a muse’)

How you think of an essay may influence how you write it. Citrus fruits come in segments; so do worms. Each segment is part of an organic whole. But a fragmented essay may be broken on purpose and a collage deliberately glued together.

Braided Essays

origin Old English bregdan ‘make a sudden movement,’ also ‘interweave,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch breien (verb)

Braided essays are segmented essays whose sections have a repeating pattern—the way each strand of a braid returns to take its place in the center.

Each time a particular strand returns, its meaning is enriched by the other threads you’ve read through.

You can braid hair for containment or ornamentation. You can braid fibers into a basket to carry something or into a rope to tie something. Maybe it’s something you want to hold fast. Or maybe it’s to tense a kite against the wind—to fly.

Hermit Crab Essays

origin Middle English: from Old French hermite, from late Latin eremita, from Greek eremites, from eremos ‘solitary’

origin late sixteenth century (referring to hawks, meaning ‘claw or fight each other’): from Low German krabben

Hermit crab essays, as Brenda Miller named them in Tell It Slant , borrow another form of writing as their structure the way a hermit crab borrows another’s shell. These extraliterary structures can protect vulnerable content (the way the shell protects the crab), but they can also act as firm containers for content that might be intellectually or emotionally difficult, prodigious, or otherwise messy.

In life hermit crabs aren’t hermits at all; they’re quite social. And in a way hermit crab essays are too, because they depend on a network of other extraliterary forms of writing—recipes, labels, album notes—and what we already know of them.

I’ve always thought that a hermit crab’s front looks like a hand reaching out of the shell, a gesture that draws the onlooker inwards. Instead of needing a shell that protects, the contents of a hermit crab essay might lie in wait—like the pellets in a shotgun shell or a plumule of a seed—ready to burst beyond the confines of the form and take root in the reader’s mind.

But some of these forms overlap. A lyric essay can be many things at once—flash and braided, segmented and hermit crab—the way a square is also a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral. One shape, but many ways of naming it.

Orpheus’s lyre accompanied him through all sorts of adventures. It traveled with him as deep as the underworld and after his death was sent by Zeus to live among the stars. You can see its constellation—Lyra—in the summer months if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter months if you live in the Southern. This feels like an apt metaphor for the lyric essay: The stars are there, but their shape is what your mind brings to them.

A version of this essay was published as the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays .

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection  Be with Me Always   was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays,  A Harp in the Stars ,  was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of  The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity,  and  Creative Nonfiction . Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine  After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low Residency MFA Program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website,  www.randonbillingsnoble.com .

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Lyric Essay

The lyric Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. <strong>Informal Essay: </strong>Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's <em>Periodical Essays.... </em>Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. <strong>Formal Essay: </strong>Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay is a hybrid form in creative nonfiction that focuses on Cadence The rhythm established in the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in a phrasal unit. In a third and broader sense it is the rhythmical movement of writing when it is read aloud, the modulation produced by the rise and fall of the voice, the rhythm that sounds the "inner" tune" of a sentence or a line. Cadence is customarily used to refer to a larger and looser group of syllabus than the formal, metrical movement of regular accentual-syllabic verse. Modern poets, such as Ezra(...) Term details " >rhythm and Cadence The rhythm established in the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in a phrasal unit. In a third and broader sense it is the rhythmical movement of writing when it is read aloud, the modulation produced by the rise and fall of the voice, the rhythm that sounds the "inner" tune" of a sentence or a line. Cadence is customarily used to refer to a larger and looser group of syllabus than the formal, metrical movement of regular accentual-syllabic verse. Modern poets, such as Ezra(...) Term details " >cadence as much as context, often employing Poetry "Poetry is one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language." (<em>The Norton Anthology of World(...)</em> Term details " >poetic devices to create repetition and layered meanings.

A brief subjective Poetry "Poetry is one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language." (<em>The Norton Anthology of World(...)</em> Term details " >poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating a single, unified impression. ( A Handbook to Literature )

Originally, a Poetry "Poetry is one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language." (<em>The Norton Anthology of World(...)</em> Term details " >poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; now, any relatively short Poetry "Poetry is one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language." (<em>The Norton Anthology of World(...)</em> Term details " >poem in which the speaker expresses his or her thoughts and feelings in the first person rather than recounting a narrative or portraying a dramatic situation. ( Norton )

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Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Seneca review book prize.

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THE DEBORAH TALL LYRIC ESSAY BOOK PRIZE

Seneca Review Books , in conjunction with the TRIAS writer-in-residence program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, is continuing its a biennial book series to encourage and support innovative work in the essay.

• Cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and "beyond category" projects are all within the ambit of the contest.

Please submit an original manuscript of 48-120 pages.

The prize will be administered by the editors of   Seneca Review . The winning manuscript to be selected by this year's judge, Wendy S. Walters, and will be published by   Seneca Review Books   in the fall of 2024.

Along with publication the author will receive a $2000 prize and a reading with HWS Colleges. The submission period is June 1 - August 1, 2023 through Submittable.

A decision will be announced by mid-December, 2023.

Submission Guidelines

• Please submit an original manuscript in English of 48-120 pages.
• Multiple submissions are acceptable as long as they are submitted separately with separate entry fees.
• Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please be sure to withdraw your submission via Submittable if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• The competition is open to writers who have previously published book-length collections, as well as to unpublished writers.
• Please update any changes in contact information via your profile on Submittable.
• No revisions to submitted manuscripts will be considered. The author of the winning manuscript will have the opportunity to edit mistakes and suggest revisions prior to publication.
• There is a non-refundable submission fee of $27 payable through Submittable.
• Your manuscript should include a single cover page with the title of the manuscript only, so that your manuscript document remains anonymous. Be sure that your document is complete and formatted correctly before uploading.
• Individual essays/pieces in a manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks, but the work as a whole must be unpublished. If applicable, include with your manuscript an acknowledgments page for prior publications.
• Intimate friends, relatives, or current and former students of Wendy S. Walters are not eligible to submit.

Wendy S. Walters

Wendy S. Walters is Associate Professor in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where she directs the Nonfiction Concentration. She is the author of two books of poems and a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. With Elyse Nelson, she co-edited the volume   Fictions of Emancipation: Reconsidering Why Born Enslaved!   She is completing a book about white paint, forthcoming in 2024.

Process and Ethics

Seneca Review and HWS Colleges Press endorse and abide by the Ethical Guidelines of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP): "CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines–defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage."

After the submission deadline, manuscripts will be divided among Seneca Review editors, who will select approximately 15 semi-finalist manuscripts. The Seneca Review editors will then work in a classroom setting with an undergraduate Acquisitions Editorial Board to narrow down the manuscripts to five finalists. Wendy S. Walters will then select, by December 10th, the winning manuscript. We will announce the winner before the end of December.

Katherine Indermaur

I|I , selected by Kazim Ali to win the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, is available now from Amazon or directly from Seneca Review Books.

Katherine Indermaur’s full-length debut, I|I, is a serial lyric essay that explores the mirror’s many dimensions—philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical—alongside the author’s own experiences. Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one’s own reflection. Indermaur’s essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirmation to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song.

Praise for I|I

“In fragments one might be known. Seen from dozens of angles, the mind may move among facets and see the whole. It is, in fact, how seeing works in the human brain anyhow. Katherine Indermaur’s I|I finds rich resonances among these disparate but not discrete shards. Rather a full shape in time and space assembles. Both the ‘lyric’ and the ‘essay’ are fully achieved, home is sought, the self seeks to connect with all of what is beyond.” —Kazim Ali, Judge, 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize

“’Every seeing distorts the world,’ writes Katherine Indermaur in I|I. Culling historical and cultural fragments of what mirrors are, as well as what they mean, Indermaur invites us to peer into longing and wonder. She pulls us in close to the reflection, asking us to look deeper into words and meaning, revealing a fragmented yet encompassing portrait of what it means to confront the self beyond the perceived ‘I.’ With an eye to both poetry and philosophy, I|I reveals the dangers of seeing, how light and reflection, once unveiled, give way to a broken and distorted existence and perception of so many unending selves. It is a delight to gaze into these mirrory fragments, seemingly stretching into infinity.” —Jenny Boully, author most recently of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“With her meditative capture of the ways of looking, Katherine Indermaur assembles an exquisite composite of personal memory, facial (and existential) examination, etymology, and cross-cultural ways of seeing oneself in I|I. This brilliant lyric flows like a resplendent river replete with tributaries and oxbow lakes, where each bend of water orients the eye to new lines of sight. This essay is visionary, it envisions, revising its modes of seeing to query the quotidian practice of seeing oneself in a reflective surface. Reminiscent of Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book or Eliot Weinberger’s elliptical essays, Indermaur’s essaying is a facing of her subject that is ultimately uniquely her own. Here are ‘fragments’ which ‘feed out on light. On looking.’ And how transcendent the journey.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of

“’If I could only see more clearly my own seeing.’ So begins Katherine Indermaur’s stunning I|I, a book that looks long, and longingly, at vision itself. In our ocularcentric world, both mirror and eye, not unlike language, are taken at face value. The eye/I of these poem-essays glides over the surface while, at the same time, ‘unsurfac[ing] things,’ ushering the reader into a depth that challenges the reign of vision. In the spirit of Levinas and Buber, Indermaur offers us a handbook of compassionate seeing, a ‘practice’ we so desperately need after these screen-filled, isolated years. ‘A practice: Tell your subject to look in your eyes. Look equally in your subject’s eyes. Look therein for your own reflected face.’ It is through such practices that we begin to see that language is both a series of relations (words are ‘cousins of wonder,’ ‘sisters’) and the very thing of which relationships are made. While Indermaur knows the complexity of these relations, she cannot help but hope, as we all should, that through them we might find one another again: ‘If only it were this clear: Sight so precise (you and I) call it a line.’” —Sasha Steensen, author most recently of Everything Awake

• Poets & Writers: Literary MagNet: Katherine Indermaur
• Colorado Sun: “2023 Colorado Book Awards honor winners in 16 categories at Colorado Springs celebration”
• Colorado State University alumni magazine Around the Oval, summer 2023 issue

Interviews:

• Sweet Lit: Interview with Katherine Indermaur: Mirrors, New Rituals, and Writing Against Shame
• Poet to Poet with Radha Marcum: From Fragments to Whole: Building a Book
• Colorado State University’s English Department: “In Conversation: MFA Alumna Katherine Indermaur publishes first book ‘I|I'”
• The Rumpus with EJ Levy: A Reflection on Reflection: An Interview with Katherine Indermaur
• rob mclennan’s blog: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Indermaur
• Colorado Review: Katherine Indermaur discusses hybridity, research, and the self
• On Autofocus Lit’s The Lives of Writers podcast
• Psaltery & Lyre: Looking to Mirrors, the Lyric Essay, and Punctuation: An Interview with Katherine Indermaur on “I|I”
• Tarpaulin Sky: Julia Cohen’s and Abby Hagler’s Original Obsessions : An Interview with Katherine Indermaur
• Colorado Poets Center, The Colorado Poet, Issue #38, Winter 2023: Interrogating the Visual World with Katherine Indermaur: The I|I in the Looking Glass
• In New Delta Review by Halley McArn
• In Sweet Lit by Chelsea Dingman
• In Colorado Review by Linda Scheller
• In Tupelo Quarterly by Esteban Rodriguez
• 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize
• 2023 Colorado Book Award

Published Excerpts from the Book

Here are some previously published excerpts you can read online if you want a sneak peek at what’s in the book:

• New Delta Review (2019)
• Oxidant|Engine (2019)
• Ex/Post Magazine (2022)

Additional excerpts were also published in GASHER Journal, Ghost Proposal , Coast|noCoast issue 2, Seneca Review vol. 51 no. 2 , Pulpmouth, and as a 2021 chapbook titled Facing the Mirror: An Essay (Coast|noCoast Press).

A Note on Pronunciation

I|I is pronounced by repeating the personal pronoun “I” once after a brief pause.

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Maximizing the Butterfly Effect in Faculty Mentoring

As we approach the launch of the fourth cohort of the Propel Research Mentorship Program, it's an opportune moment to reflect on the profound impact of faculty mentoring in academia. The Propel program, which supports new and early-career faculty through intensive mentorship, education and editing support, exemplifies our institution's commitment to nurturing the next generation of researchers. Over the past three years, 172 junior faculty members have completed the program, securing over $27 million in federal grants—a testament to the power of structured mentorship.

However, the importance of mentoring extends far beyond any single program. It's a cornerstone of academic success, shaping careers and strengthening institutions in ways both seen and unseen. As we prepare to welcome 52 mentees to Propel, I find myself reflecting on how my own journey demonstrates the ups and downs, and ultimately the vital importance of faculty mentorship in fostering a supportive and thriving academic community.

Over the years, mentoring students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty has been one of the most rewarding parts of my job.

Serving as a professor at an R1 university in the United States can bring great challenges, but it is also a great privilege. Over the years, mentoring students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty has been one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Perhaps because I entered academia with a somewhat poor understanding of the complicated demands of a faculty position, I later made it one of my missions to guide new assistant professors through the complexities of their roles.

Starting out as a mentee

As is the case for many first-generation college students, my path through higher education was long and winding, marked by false starts and direction changes. Impostor syndrome – the persistent feeling of self-doubt where a person believes they are not as competent as others perceive them to be, despite evidence of their success – does not quite capture how I felt as a graduate student. A more apt description might be that, in the beginning, I felt clueless regarding the path forward as I navigated graduate school at the University of Arizona. But once I had found my path, the rest of the way was like a sprint through an intellectual obstacle course, keeping an eye on the graduation prize but just barely clearing each hurdle along the way. In hindsight, I think I sacrificed the quality and depth of my education for speed because I felt I had squandered too much time after dropping out of college earlier. Don’t get me wrong, my Ph.D. mentor, Audrey Holland, was a world-renowned researcher, but in some ways, I failed to take full advantage of what she had to offer because I was in such a rush to move on with my life (and, like so many graduate students, I was completely broke with lots of student loan debt).

I left Arizona without having defended my dissertation and took a faculty position at the University of South Carolina. Here was my meager academic baseline: No teaching experience, only two peer-reviewed papers in print, an “ABD” degree ( all but dissertation ), no grant writing experience, limited understanding of the tenure requirements, and no experience directing graduate students. Regardless, ready or not, in my first year as an assistant professor, I took on my first Ph.D. student. In over two decades since, I have mentored 16 Ph.D. students and 12 postdoctoral fellows. I suspect I'm a far better advisor now than when Leigh Odom and Dana Moser, my first two Ph.D. students, started in my lab. Despite my inexperience, both Dr. Odom and Dr. Moser have excelled, becoming tenured professors and department chairs—achievements that fill me with immense pride.

I emphasize the critical balance between meeting professional standards and maintaining personal well-being, stressing that sustainable success requires both.

So, as I began my career at USC in 2001, I was woefully underprepared for life on the tenure track. Thankfully, the chair of my department, Dr. Elaine Frank, took it upon herself to mentor me. Elaine was no shrinking violet, and she was always the strongest voice in the room so I knew that being her mentee would mean lots of hard work and very little hand-holding. In hindsight, she operated more like a department dictator than a department chair, but her forcefulness was always in service of the worthy goal of improving our department’s academic stature. Dr. Frank approached mentorship with the same strength and clarity of intention.

I have had many lucky breaks in my academic career – being mentored by Elaine Frank was certainly among the top two. From the start, we set up regular meetings to discuss my career plans, goals and trajectory with a clear list of to-dos. This included prepping classes, setting up a lab and outlining initial studies with a clear path to publication. These initial meetings were structured but also involved ample time for a free conversation about whatever I was struggling with at the moment. Upon my hiring, Elaine, who had recently become department chair, transferred to me some of her teaching responsibilities along with all associated slides, syllabi, and class notes. She also brought me into a couple of research collaborations she already had in the works. When it came to faculty service beyond research and classroom responsibilities, Elaine made sure that my load was minimal, but involved activities that would help me learn about the governance of the department, college and university.

Although Elaine’s approach to structured mentoring was helpful, I think that the most important aspect of our mentor-mentee relationship was having someone to act as my “go-to” person—someone who could give advice regarding difficult situations or just be there to listen when things looked bleak. In the beginning, there were lots of those moments. In my second and third years as an assistant professor, I didn’t have a single publication. Although I had managed to secure an R03 grant from the NIH, the lack of publications was a concern, which, much to my dismay, was clearly reflected in my annual reviews. Starting out from such a weak baseline, it took me a while to figure out how to be productive as a proverbial nobody in my field who was scarcely sought out by graduate students and postdocs. Without Elaine’s sage mentoring, I am not convinced I would have received tenure and promotion to associate professor.

Earlier, I mentioned two major breaks in my career. The second and biggest break was being Dr. Audrey Holland’s mentee. A giant in my field, Audrey was second to nobody. Going to conferences with her was like being with a celebrity. People were drawn to Audrey and sought her counsel on all kinds of topics. Although Audrey had been my Ph.D. mentor, our relationship in those years was nowhere near as significant as what was to come as I established my faculty career at USC. As a Ph.D. mentor, Audrey was extremely demanding, and I found it impossible to warm up to her. I suspect the feeling was mutual. After I defended my dissertation the same fall that I started my faculty job, I lost touch with her for several years. We met occasionally at conferences, but our conversations were routine and unmemorable.

Then, something happened that would change our relationship forever. I was struggling to write my first NIH R01 grant application and mentioned this to Audrey at one of the conferences where we happened to meet. Audrey had retired from the University of Arizona but maintained a very active academic life as a researcher and consultant on projects all over the world. Much to my surprise, she suggested that I visit her in Arizona where she would help me write the grant proposal. The result of that trip was my first funded R01 grant and, more importantly, the true beginning of one of the most consequential relationships of my life.

I found Audrey, the retired professor, to be kind and thoughtful and to have a first-rate sense of humor. So, starting in 2007 and most years since, I would visit Audrey annually, and we would work on grant proposals or manuscripts. Gradually, our phone calls increased in frequency, and the topics changed from grants and publications to career advice and eventually to things mostly unrelated to academia. Audrey died last year, and although age had taken a toll on her mental acuity, her passing marked the ending to our unique relationship, which merged mentoring and friendship without a clear boundary between the two.

As vice president for research, my primary goal is to enhance USC's collective research impact. The most effective way to achieve this is by supporting our faculty, including through mentorship.

Transitioning from mentee to mentor

As I mentioned earlier, my foray into mentoring graduate students was like building an airplane mid-flight. Thankfully, I had Elaine Frank to guide me through the initial hurdles, and my experiences as Audrey's student also gave me ideas. Undoubtedly, I also learned quite a bit through trial and error, hopefully without causing too much trouble for my students. Over the years, I developed a mentoring philosophy centered on setting high expectations while recognizing individual potential. I establish a clear baseline threshold that all my Ph.D. students must meet in terms of preparation and performance. However, I make it explicit that while this threshold is non-negotiable, I understand that each student's capacity to exceed it varies. Some may soar far beyond, while others may hover just above it – and both scenarios are acceptable. This approach allows me to push students to reach their full potential without applying a one-size-fits-all standard. I combine this with regular communication, constructive feedback and guidance in navigating academia beyond just research. My goal is to cultivate independent researchers who not only contribute significantly to our field but also understand and work within their individual strengths and limitations.

Drawing from my experiences as a first-generation college student and new assistant professor, my approach to mentoring junior faculty is not that much different from mentoring graduate students. I start by making sure they thoroughly understand their unit's tenure guidelines and expectations, analyzing the academic stature of recent tenure recipients to set realistic benchmarks. I emphasize the critical balance between meeting professional standards and maintaining personal well-being, stressing that sustainable success requires both. My approach involves regular check-ins to offer tailored advice, helping mentees navigate academia's unwritten rules and connect with essential resources. The ultimate goal is to cultivate resilient faculty who excel academically, maintain a balanced life and eventually mentor others, fostering a supportive academic ecosystem.

Creating a legacy of excellence

Although the previous paragraph is written in the present tense, it is mostly aspirational at this point as I have very limited time for personal mentoring due to a demanding administrative schedule. Yet, I remain deeply committed to peer-to-peer mentoring and applaud our academic units and faculty that take this responsibility seriously. That’s why one of my first acts as USC’s new vice president for research in 2021 was to institute or expand programs like the Propel Research Mentorship Program and the NSF Career Bootcamp. After just a few short years, the results speak for themselves. Never have we had as many active NIH R01 grants or NSF Career awards at USC, an accomplishment that is directly related to our mentoring programs. But beyond the numbers, it's the individual stories of growth and success that truly resonate. For example, one of our assistant professors and Propel graduates recently had an NIH R01 grant application ranked in the first percentile, an amazing feat.

As vice president for research, my primary goal is to enhance USC's collective research impact. The most effective way to achieve this is by supporting our faculty, including through mentorship. My experiences as both mentee and mentor have shown me that mentorship transcends mere professional development; it creates a supportive ecosystem where individuals can thrive, pushing boundaries while maintaining personal well-being. Developing junior faculty from the outset of their careers is one of the best investments we can make as a university.

As we welcome the next cohort of Propel participants, I challenge all of us at USC to embrace mentorship wholeheartedly. Regardless of career stage, every member of our academic community has valuable insights to offer and gain. Let's make mentorship a cornerstone of our culture, remembering that every great mentor was once a mentee. Your experiences can illuminate the path for others. In case mentoring is not already a part of your academic portfolio, I urge you to seek out mentorship opportunities, offer your guidance and advocate for mentorship programs. Together, we can foster an academic community that not only supports and challenges, but truly inspires us all, propelling USC to new heights of research excellence and impact.

Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

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Swifties in Vienna Cry, Commiserate and Try to Shake It Off

Taylor Swift fans from around the world grappled with disappointment and fear after a terrorism plot derailed the Vienna dates of the Eras Tour.

Taylor Swift Fans in Vienna React After Cancellations

Taylor swift fans described their disappointment after organizers canceled her eras tour dates in vienna after austrian authorities uncovered a terrorist plot targeting the event..

“We’re just really happy that everyone’s safe.” “We planned all year to be here. So, what a huge disappointment for our friends and for our kids.” “It’s kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity to come with my bestie to see Taylor Swift. And so I’m a little bummed.” “I guess, at the end of the day, safety comes first. But it’s really heartbreaking as well for me and for all of the fans of Taylor Swift.” “The concert itself being canceled is sad, but also we’re really thankful that the men and women who were tracking this, caught it before anything major could have happened.”

By Sarah Maslin Nir

Reporting from Vienna

Just as she was boarding her flight at Boston Logan International Airport headed for a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Mary DePetris excitedly checked the online fan group, Swiftie Nation.

Austrian authorities had discovered a terrorist plot targeting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the city, she read. On Wednesday, just before takeoff, organizers canceled all three shows. Ms. DePetris, 47, stepped onto the plane and broke the news to some of her fellow passengers.

“Half the plane was crying,” Ms. DePetris said. “It’s not just about the shows, it’s the community coming together and feeling safe at her concerts, and Swifties letting their guard down. And this just shifted all of that,” she said. “How can we do that now that we feel we are targeted?”

As the estimated 200,000 people who had been expected to worship at Ms. Swift’s proscenium in Vienna grappled with crushing disappointment, wasted money and a measure of fear at narrowly avoiding danger, a sea of fans flooded the baroque city looking for ways to shake it off.

They traded Eras merchandise in the shadow of the vacant stadium, or dissolved into tears when they caught the strains of Ms. Swift’s stanzas drifting from the doorways of sympathetic gift shops or churches. Some hung handmade friendship bracelets — a treasured Swiftie talisman inspired by a song lyric — on a tree on Corneliusgasse, a central Vienna thoroughfare whose name echoes the title of Ms. Swift’s song “Cornelia Street.” There, hundreds hugged, cried and commiserated in the middle of the road.

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