The Assay Interview Project: Heidi Czerwiec
October 1, 2026

Heidi Czerwiec [she|her|hers] is an essayist and poet; author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States (selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose), Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the poetry collection Conjoining; and 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. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com ​
About The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers: Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh open the edited collection with an illuminating history of the lyric essay’s emergence and its increasingly vital place in American literature and beyond. With original craft essays, exercises, and examples, the contributors offer reflection and instruction on how one goes about writing a lyric essay. The anthology’s expertise spans possible forms (braid, fragment, hermit crab, zuihitsu), lyric techniques (anaphora, fractal repetition, word associations, use of white space), and lyric processes (incorporating research or visual elements, engineering leaps, sustaining a longform lyric essay). It thus fills a gap in the literature on a form that’s become beloved to writers, readers, and editors of literary journals.
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.

JE: Poetry has been more comprehensively and expansively theorized, as far as I know, than the nonfiction genres. How did the training both you co-editors have in poetry deepen the book.

HC: Absolutely! About a couple thousand more years’ worth of theory! And while both Lee and I had extensive training in poetics and lyric theory through several graduate degrees, there hasn’t been a lot of scholarship examining how those concepts and strategies are being applied to prose. Is it the exact same strategy just imported into a new genre? Is it a translation or an adaptation that creates differences in how we read or interpret or experience that strategy? These are some of the issues lyric essayists consider while grappling with what “lyric” means, and what most interests us. I do think it defined our approach, as I described above, but it also helped us in our selection of contributing authors. We pulled a lot from poets we knew were writing lyric prose, and who were exploring these questions and interstices in exciting ways, which led to some hopefully surprising choices, such as identifying Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s food writing as participating in the Horatian ode tradition, or how repetitions of visual images can function like anaphora.

JE: How did you balance a focus on the lyric essay with exploring such a wonderfully wide range of questions?

HC: Lee and I each separately wrote a wishlist of possible contributors and what we saw as their lyric essay superpower. When we compared lists, there were happily a ton of overlaps, though we each had come up with interesting choices not on the other’s list, and it was happily a list that represented a diverse range of authors. We proposed loosely dividing the book into three broad sections—forms, specific lyric techniques, and more conceptual processes or approaches—and tried to choose authors/topics from our lists to distribute equally across those sections, but from a variety of perspectives and approaches so as to avoid redundancies. When we contacted authors, we told them what superpower of theirs had led us to invite them, and most were happy to write on that craft element. A few suggested alternative topics, and some authors had to drop out and be replaced. But the balance we proposed from our early drafting stages is remarkably close to what appears in the book. I don’t know—maybe we just got lucky, both with our plan and with our artists?

JE: I was blown away by how compact your introduction was--how did you manage to tell the story of the lyric essay (and the scholarship on it) in such a compact way?

HC: Ha! Believe me, we could have gone on longer! And I think in early drafts that we did. We recognized that our introduction might be cited as a source for scholarship, and therefore needed to cover the relevant history, theory, and current considerations regarding the lyric essay, as well as clarify our position on and definition of the term. But at the same time, we also intended for the book to be used by writers and students with a wide span of abilities, so we didn’t want to get too into the weeds. The Rose Metal Press editors, Kathleen Rooney and Abigail Beckel, were also helpful with this process—during our many drafts, they would note when they didn’t understand something and needed more background or explanation, but also when we were going too deep. In many cases, the compactness was achieved by briefly covering other scholarship and then pointing readers toward the source material if they wanted that deeper dive. 

JE: I admired the prose throughout the book, and noticed internal rhyme along with beautiful rhythmic prose. How important was it for the craft book to SOUND like a good book of creative nonfiction?

HC: That’s a really interesting take! And you’re right—these pieces are so beautiful. You know, I’ll let you in on a secret: most of the first drafts of contributors’ craft essays—not their lyric essay examples, but the craft essays—were originally MUCH more lyrically written. I don’t think lyric essayists can help ourselves; that’s just how we write! But the press editors felt like that lyricism needed to be dialed back in favor of clarity for the sake of readers who are less familiar with lyric prose. They’ve done several Field Guides, so I’m sure they understand what’s effective. We did negotiate on some of the dialing, though.

JE: We creative writers often hear about the collaborations of our friends in the social and natural sciences with intrigue or envy, but don’t venture into collaboration ourselves. I found every piece of text that I thought was cowritten by the editors to have a consistent, coherent voice. What was that collaboration like, and what could you say to writers who are curious about co-authoring? 

HC: When Rose Metal Press offered me the opportunity to edit this Field Guide, they said I could either do it alone, or find a co-editor. Lee immediately came to mind—we’ve had brilliant conversations about writing and music, including in another interview in Assay, and their work has meant so much to me—and I’m so thrilled they said yes. But your question is an important one, and while Lee and I felt very simpatico, we had never collaborated on a project before. Before doing so, I think it’s important that collaborators have some serious, honest discussions to get a sense of what your working relationship might be like, that cover the following: What is the scope of the project and how long do you expect it will take (an article over a month or two, or a book project that may take a few years)? What are your positions/thoughts/feelings on the project’s topic going into it—do you match up on the important issues, but perhaps vary in useful or interesting ways? What are your strengths and weaknesses, because combined, they may be amplified, but can also complement or balance each other out. What other personal and/or professional responsibilities may interfere with your project schedule? And on the more granular issue of writing, how do you want to handle that? Write in a dialogue style with each author adding their distinct and separate voice? Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold pulled this off to great effect in their intro to the anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance. Or, if you want a consistent voice, how will you achieve that: Assign each person chunks to write and then revise together? Have one person draft and the other revise? Write and revise everything together?

Working with Lee was a dream. I don’t mean to say that it was easy. This was an unexpectedly years-long project due to major disruptions: the implosion of Small Press Distribution which threw off Rose Metal Press’s schedule, the death of Lee’s mother and settling her estate, the federal attack on and occupation of my city of Minneapolis. Minor disruptions included course prep or grading, or travel for residencies. And there were negotiations with contributing authors and with the press editors. But even when there were frustrations, I always felt like Lee and I had each other’s back and were willing to take turns tapping into the ring when the other needed a timeout. As for writing, we mostly divvied up chunks to draft, and then worked on revising together. And it’s funny, but I found us taking on qualities or expressions from each other’s writing, so by the end of the project, it was pretty easy to have a consistent voice!

JE: What were some questions you couldn’t fit into the final draft of the book, or couldn’t quite get to, that might be the seed of lyric essay scholarship to come? 

HC: Oh, that’s a great question! We had hoped to have a piece on how lyric strategies for incorporating research into a lyric essay may differ than in other nonfiction—Katrina Vandenberg’s piece suggests adding research, and Chaun Webster theorizes about the unstable archive, but nothing that focuses on research. Kathryn Nuernberger had written an incredibly thoughtful piece that was too long and high-level for the purposes of the book, but she graciously allowed us to publish a version of it in Assay. Sarah Minor had an astonishing take on visually mapping Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Woven,” but it was too much of a separate issue from the craft essay’s tight focus, so it got cut, but I hope to see it published somewhere as its own craft essay someday. Based on Rigoberto González’s piece on interior and exterior lyric “I,” and Michael Kleber-Diggs’s piece on cultivating voice, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not such a thing as the lyric essay “I” exists—what that would entail, and how might it function differently from either the lyric “I” or the “I” of memoir. But I’m thrilled with and proud of all the ways this book will expand the scholarly, creative, and pedagogical conversations about the lyric essay.

JE: Marvelous. I'm so glad to see this book out in the world—thank you, Heidi.
Joanna Eleftheriou [she|her|hers] is the author of the essay collection This Way Back (West Virginia University Press, 2020). Joanna has published essays, poems, and translations in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Asymptote, Arts & Letters, and The Common. She is associate professor of English at Christopher Newport University and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Find her on at @joannaessayist and online at www.joannaeleftheriou.com ​

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