on the non-form form: the lyric essay.

It’s about time I introduce my love affair with a so-called sub-genre of nonfiction, that is the lyric essay. I studied the lyric essay my last year of college in an attempt to understand and write in this style. Even now, it is vague and undefined. You can find any number of descriptions and definitions floating around, but when put on the spot, I always answered by explaining that it is non-linear. It is somewhere between the land of the essay and the ocean of the poem.

I have spent the day reading critiques of the lyric essay. Blog posts arguing that it only produces a sort of shallow writing or it was formed from the anti-narrative movement of poets coming out of Iowa’s Workshop in the late 90s.  I have somewhat idealized this writing form in my mind. I can be honest - I’m naive. I come from an English program at a extremely small, intensely religious Midwestern school. When I stumbled across that issue of the Seneca Review that introduced the lyric essay, I became intoxicated with writing in a way that was experimental, unexpected. I jumped at the opportunity to push the bounds among my classmates and in the department.

I have continued to make attempts at writing in this “form” and have hit my fair share of walls. It’s loose and undefined. There’s a very fine line between work that is nonsense and work that is contrived, at least for me. So I’m going to try something new, an experiment in how I think of writing in my own head. I’m going to toss the idea of the lyric essay, at least for now. Just to try it out and see what happens.


When it really comes down to it, there are a few reasons I write. I write to uncover truth and reality, to open up new ways of seeing and to offer connection. I think of it in terms of layers. You see the world this way when I tell the story like this. But I add a layer or two, like the old transparencies professors would use during class, and you’re looking at the exact same thing with new meaning and context. In creating that world, you can understand this world in a new way. You can understand yourself. You can be challenged to think.

I mean, that’s all. I’m not trying to change the world or anything.

So I’m going to ditch the non-form form that I’ve been holding myself to and see how that freedom feels. Have you created rules and boundaries for yourself? Toss them. It’s good to change things up.