Drawing from discussions in Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord on such elements as juxtaposition, lateral moves, fragments, and white space, this class will explore how incorporating multiple approaches while writing the braided essay can amplify your material in powerful and unexpected ways. After reading some examples, we will practice writing different kinds of threads that might form the basis for your braid, including personal experience, research, and imagined scenes. Next, we’ll discuss how segments of your threads might be juxtaposed to create connections and/or leaps. We’ll also discuss how white space can and should be used thoughtfully as a tool in itself—not only as breaks between sections in which to let the reader process, but also to indicate fragmented experiences, what’s missing or erased, silences chosen or imposed, or the White spaces surrounding BIPOC experience. Finally, we will discuss lyric strategies of sound and image repetition to create resonances across your threads, to bind them into the braid.

By the end of this workshop, writers will…

• Understand the basic structure of the braided essay and how its elements work.

• Have practiced writing different approaches to their material to create the “threads” for their braids, and have practiced weaving those segments together to create meaningful juxtapositions.

• Have identified places where white space might be deployed.

• Have identified words, sounds, and/or images that might be repeated to create lyric resonance.

Who is the Instructor? Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, the lyric essay collection Fluid States (selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose), and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.

Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

When is this class offered?

This class is offered Thursday, May 23 from 7-9 p.m. EST. This workshop is open to writers of all levels. 

Interested in the class but the date does not work for you? Don’t despair. All registrants will receive a recording of the class within three business days of the course.