Writing the Lyric Essay with Gary McDowell

This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. 

Tuesdays, Sept 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct 7, 7-9 pm Central time.

“The lyric essay happens when I’ve forgotten to get dressed. When I’m disheveled.  When I’m not wearing any shoes.”

~ Brenda Miller

“The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.”

~ Deborah Tall and John D’Agata

Not a poem, not a narrative, not an idea-driven essay, but something other.  Outside and/or inside this post-structuralist definition exists a genre of writing contemporarily vital to our literature.  Braided through image, language, story, rhythm, and mimetic technique, the lyric essay expands upon its forbearers (Creative Nonfiction and New Journalism) popularized in the 1960s and 1970s by the likes of Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.  The lyric essay, however, has pushed beyond even those texts to include new levels of perception and insight, music and poetry.  In this class, we will spend the first four weeks defining, reading, discussing, and writing the lyric essay (writers discussed may include, among others, Lia Purpura, Joni Tevis, T Fleischmann, Karen Green, Brian Lennon, and Brenda Miller), and then we will embark upon a two-week workshop-style look at our own work.

Instructor bio: Gary McDowell is the author of seven books, most recently Aflame (White Pine Press, 2020). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, among many others. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN.