IMF 52306 Nonfiction: Lyric & Personal Essays L W

Instructor

Lisa Haag

Class Type

Workshop

Course Description

The lyric and personal essay course is designed to explore your unique perspective on the world through creative nonfiction. Our consideration will be on crafting lyric and personal essays through eight weeks of reading, writing, and discussion.

A lyric essay is a mixture of essay and poetry conventions and is more associative than conclusive; the personal essay, on the other hand, is a singular attempt in prose to suggest meaning, and make connections. As one of its chief writers, Annie Dillard, said about the form, “there’s nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them. The material is the world itself…”

Some lyric and personal essayists you might be familiar with include David Sedaris, Anne Carson, Joan Didion, Sherman Alexie, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, and James Wright.