Interview with Heidi Czerwiec
Joanna Eleftheriou
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Joanna Eleftheriou: Tell us how this project began -- we both know that interest in the lyric essay has grown quite rapidly, so I imagine you saw quite a few gaps in the scholarship on the lyric essay. How did you figure out which part or aspect of that gap you wanted to fill?
Heidi Czerwiec: It actually began with the manuscript of my previous craft book, Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, which I’d written because I was frustrated that while there were excellent individual craft essays on the lyric essay, it didn’t seem like there were any dedicated craft books theorizing and analyzing how lyric strategies were being applied to the essay form. I originally sent the manuscript of Crafting the Lyric Essay to Rose Metal Press who, while they liked it, said they didn’t publish single author craft books. But they said they had been thinking about adding a lyric essay installment to their Field Guide series, and would I be interested in editing? I was, and asked Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh to co-edit this project. Lee and I had a long email back-and-forth to establish our shared credo about lyric essays and what we wanted to accomplish, and almost right away, we agreed that we wanted to feature a range of newer voices. We absolutely admire and appreciate the craft writing done by authors like Brenda Miller, Jenny Boully, Nicole Walker, and others, but because it’s already so widely known and taught, we thought our efforts should go toward expanding the available perspectives. Also, because of our artistic and scholarly backgrounds in music and poetry, we were both adamant that this project emphasize the “lyric” aspect of the lyric essay—for every craft strategy covered in this book, we pressed contributors to explain how it was deployed in a specifically lyric way. Click here to continue reading. |
This Essay is a Dress
Micah McCrary
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Essaying about essays is a gut-wrenching, tergiversating process. A stroll or jaunt in some park or through some field of thought, bringing one back to an idea or nugget of understanding a bit more glossed over than when one began. It’s a process upon processes—certainly defining of what essaying-as-activity is. Essays are then a byproduct rather than an objective, and those who essay, and especially those who essay upon essays, are wont to find strange surprises in spheres of text, image, and thought.
To essay is to succumb to happy accidents. It’s to find meaning in rich personal, thematic, or topical exploration. It’s to meditate. It’s to extrapolate. It’s to examine carefully with a surgeon’s precision the significance of large and small things, and through this examination ask questions (Rilke’s beloved pastime) one could not, and would not ask, were they not essaying. To essay is all these things, no more than writing poetry as exhibition and writing fiction as adventure. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Wes Jamison
Julija Šukys
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While digging through my old notebooks recently, I found the first sentence I wrote toward this project: “I know how the tongue wags when a head is separated from its body.” As shocking as that may seem as a first and independent note or thought, it’s an image that has found its way into almost everything I’ve written. The first drafted portion of this was a brief essay on beheadings, slugs, and Wikipedia—on presence, absence, and the morality of witnessing violent media.
My Corpse Inside is a product of the pandemic: We were isolated, lonely, disconnected. I was teaching and struggling (as we all were, in many ways) with students who were either visually absent from or behaving inappropriately on my screen. How could I police behavior or attire in someone else’s home from my own? Were students “attending” behind black screens and, when they weren’t, who or what was there instead? How embodied do we need to be to learn, and how embodied can we ever actually be online? Why do we even bother to have bodies? I obsessed over this here/not-here tension, this status as ghost on the internet, and how we used it to simultaneously protect and expose our bodies. During lockdown, examples of it were everywhere. I wanted to figure all that out, without yet knowing where that would take me. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Lynette D'Amico
Julie Marie Wade
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I love your use of the term loop, that perhaps the essays and the book itself loops around themes and settings, images and time. I was thinking about circling when I was revising. I often work with a question and write towards an investigation of that question rather than a conclusion or any kind of answer. This is a form I came across when I read Elissa Washuta’s White Magic. A collection of essays that are innovative in form and subject. I’m much more interested in the form than I am in some of the subjects, which include Twin Peaks, crystals, tarot cards, and Oregon Trail II. In an interview in The Believer, Washuta says, “writing is for me a process of finding things and collaging things,” and that reflects my process. I have a subject and then I wander around trying out different things to say about it.
The effect in White Magic is incantatory, like we are moving forward while circling back to the beginning. In my writing I think the effect can sometimes be maddening for the reader, “What is the point? Can’t you just say what you mean?” I’ve learned—from readers, from writers who point me in a direction but don’t hold my hand on every page—that I have to invite my readers to follow me, or I’m just talking to myself. Click here to continue reading. |