Eleftheriou 1 - LITR 3371: Creative Writing: The Lyric Essay

Sep 22, 2026

Course syllabus for LITR 3371, Creative Writing: The Lyric Essay, led by Prof. Joanna Eleftheriou. Defines the lyric essay as creative nonfiction that borrows poetic resources such as segmentation, juxtaposition, and an effaced narrative presence. Outlines objectives, experiments with fragmented “mosaical” arrangement through related contexts, and details weekly readings and writing assignments. Requires five micro-essays, two long lyric essays, and a craft analysis with revision rationale, plus presentations and rigorous class participation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time2 min

AccessFree to download

Course Description and Objectives

Required Texts and Required Writing

Other Requirements

Week 1: Introductory Lyric Essays

Week 2: Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays

Week 3: Notes from No Man’s Land

Week 4: Workshop Essay 1 (Workshops 1-6)

Week 5: Workshop Essay 1 (Workshops 7-11)

Week 6: Workshop Essay 1 (Workshops 12-16)

Week 7: Hermit Crab Essays

Week 8: Collection

Week 9: Shoring the fragments

Eleftheriou 1 LITR 3371: Creative Writing: The Lyric Essay Prof. Joanna Eleftheriou Office Hours: Mon. & Wed. 12 – 3 The Lyric Essay Course Description and Objectives: The lyric essay is one of the most exciting forms of creative nonfiction, one that resonates with the twenty-first century’s need for new ways of representing our lived experience. Immediate, malleable, complicated, poetic, challenging, and ingenious, write its inventors Deborah Tall and John D'Agata, the lyric essay also gives writers a “fresh way to make music of the world.”Expanding on prior experience in traditional forms of essay and memoir, members of this writing workshop will follow those “byways” in pursuit of the expressive possibilities a genre so flexible and fresh might rightly promise. The lyric essay, as the name suggests, partakes of poetry, and its practitioners generate meaning using the resources of poetry: segmentation, juxtaposition, and an effaced narrative presence. This course, much like the lyric essay’s brief history, will be a site of experimentation. We’ll interrogate the notion that “lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically” by investigating the arrangement of fragments in other contexts: archaeologists, for example, rarely have anything but fragments to work with, and to enter a gallery or a museum exhibit is to enter a site that, too, works “mosaically.” This is the premise behind a class visit to the Tacoma Art Museum and the on-campus Scandinavian Cultural Center. By responding to weekly writing prompts and developing two of these into longer essays, by semester’s end students will have acquired a strong sense of the genre’s possibilities and challenges. Moreover, by engaging closely with a rapidly evolving form, students will complete the course equipped with a nuanced understanding of how genre boundaries evolve and influence our reading and writing practice. Required Texts: We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay: Special Double Issue of the Seneca Review (Fall 2014 & Spring 2015) on the lyric essay Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land; Lia Purpura’s On Looking; Course Reader Required Writing: Five micro-essays (responses to five of prompts, 25%) Two long lyric essays – open topic (graded when submitted for workshop, 40%) Craft analysis drawing on your reading of and about the lyric essay as a genre (10%) Revision of one long lyric essay, with revision rationale (10%) Other Requirements: Presentations: Students will choose a craft analysis from the list, examine its sources, interrogate its argument, relate it to the essays (published or not) that we’ve already read, and present their findings to the class (5%) . Class participation is central to student learning, and will be evaluated rigorously (10%) . Eleftheriou 2 Week 1: Introductory Lyric Essays In class we will discuss the formal features of the four lyric essays assigned. By identifying what makes these distinct from most other essays we’ve read, we’ll arrive at an understanding of what we mean when we say “lyric essay.”We’ll discuss the expressive possibilities of this form. Read: “Bathing” by Kathryn Winograd; “Soundtrack” by Lisa Groen Braner “Indian Education” by Sherman Alexie; “The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss Write: Write micro-essay 1, which employs a structure like that of “Soundtrack” or “Indian Education,” numbering sections according to grades or years. Reflect on the effect of imitating this structure. Week 2: Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays Read: “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion; “Before” and “New York” by Eula Biss Write: Just as Biss rewrites Didion in a style that allows meaning to arise implicitly, through juxtaposition and other devices more typical of lyric poetry, you, too, should choose a traditional essay you know well, take its title, and write a lyric micro-essay of your own. Week 3: Notes from No Man’s Land Read: “The Midwest” and “After” by Eula Biss

FAQs

What is the central focus of the lyric essay in this course?

The course emphasizes the lyric essay as creative nonfiction that uses techniques associated with poetry, including segmentation and juxtaposition, to generate meaning and reshape lived experience.

What are the required writing assignments by the end of the semester?

Students complete five micro-essays, develop two long lyric essays on an open topic, submit a craft analysis based on course readings, and revise one long lyric essay with a revision rationale.

How do the weekly assignments and workshops work?

Each week follows scheduled readings and writing tasks, culminating in workshop sessions where students submit essays for discussion and develop longer pieces through conference and presentation feedback.

Sep 22, 2026

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