Re-Enchanting the Lyric Essay: 4 Weeks, 4 Forms
SCHEDULE: 4 Sundays from 12-2 pm live on Zoom from July 19th - August 2
Early Bird Sale Ends on June 30th
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This generative creative workshop approaches the lyric essay as a site of transformation, where structure is not limitation but a kind of spellwork. Each form offers a different container for writing: a shape that holds fragmentation, memory, association, and image, allowing language to move through the body of the text in ways that deepen rather than narrow meaning.
Rather than treating form as a set of rules, we’ll treat it as a cauldron—something that concentrates and intensifies language, altering perception and making the familiar strange again through pressure, juxtaposition, and concentration.We’ll play with the shadows of goddesses, ghosts, and grimoires, re-enchanting old forms and myths with a new sense of wonder.
Across four weeks, we’ll move through different lyric essay forms as living structures: embodied ways of thinking on the page that generate new material rather than contain it, and that shift how both writer and reader experience language.
Although our focus is the lyric essay, we’ll also work with poetry and fiction that move through these same formal strategies (list, braided, hermit crab, and segmented) as sites of transformation and defamiliarization—ways of re-enchanting language, memory, and experience through structures that surprise and delight readers.
Writers may include Bhanu Kapil, Carmen Maria Machado, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Melissa Febos, among others.
COURSE SKELETON
Week 1: Lyric Essay Foundations — Lists and Accumulation
We begin with the lyric essay as a field of gathering. We’ll explore how lists, fragments, and associative structures build meaning through accumulation rather than linear argument, training attention toward imagery that evokes the five senses: taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing.
Week 2: The Braided Form
How multiple threads of thought, memory, and image can run alongside each other. We’ll look at tension, echo, and juxtaposition as generative structure, and how braided forms create layered, embodied perception.
Week 3: The Hermit Crab Form
Writing that inhabits borrowed or found forms. We’ll consider how constraint, imitation, and appropriation produce defamiliarization—allowing familiar material to become newly charged, strange, or alive.
Week 4: The Segmented Form
Discontinuous structure, sectioning, and rupture. We’ll work with fragmentation as a formal strategy for intensity, pacing, and revelation, and how broken or interrupted structures shift bodily attention and emotional rhythm on the page.
COURSE TAKEAWAYS
· Generate four new drafts or refine works-in-progress through in-class prompts.
· Receive detailed feedback from Dr. Anzalone and your peers in a supportive community.
· Build a flexible toolkit of forms for generating writing across genres.
Re-Enchanting the Lyric Essay: 4 Weeks, 4 Forms
SCHEDULE: 4 Sundays from 12-2 pm live on Zoom from July 19th - August 2
Early Bird Sale Ends on June 30th
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This generative creative workshop approaches the lyric essay as a site of transformation, where structure is not limitation but a kind of spellwork. Each form offers a different container for writing: a shape that holds fragmentation, memory, association, and image, allowing language to move through the body of the text in ways that deepen rather than narrow meaning.
Rather than treating form as a set of rules, we’ll treat it as a cauldron—something that concentrates and intensifies language, altering perception and making the familiar strange again through pressure, juxtaposition, and concentration.We’ll play with the shadows of goddesses, ghosts, and grimoires, re-enchanting old forms and myths with a new sense of wonder.
Across four weeks, we’ll move through different lyric essay forms as living structures: embodied ways of thinking on the page that generate new material rather than contain it, and that shift how both writer and reader experience language.
Although our focus is the lyric essay, we’ll also work with poetry and fiction that move through these same formal strategies (list, braided, hermit crab, and segmented) as sites of transformation and defamiliarization—ways of re-enchanting language, memory, and experience through structures that surprise and delight readers.
Writers may include Bhanu Kapil, Carmen Maria Machado, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Melissa Febos, among others.
COURSE SKELETON
Week 1: Lyric Essay Foundations — Lists and Accumulation
We begin with the lyric essay as a field of gathering. We’ll explore how lists, fragments, and associative structures build meaning through accumulation rather than linear argument, training attention toward imagery that evokes the five senses: taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing.
Week 2: The Braided Form
How multiple threads of thought, memory, and image can run alongside each other. We’ll look at tension, echo, and juxtaposition as generative structure, and how braided forms create layered, embodied perception.
Week 3: The Hermit Crab Form
Writing that inhabits borrowed or found forms. We’ll consider how constraint, imitation, and appropriation produce defamiliarization—allowing familiar material to become newly charged, strange, or alive.
Week 4: The Segmented Form
Discontinuous structure, sectioning, and rupture. We’ll work with fragmentation as a formal strategy for intensity, pacing, and revelation, and how broken or interrupted structures shift bodily attention and emotional rhythm on the page.
COURSE TAKEAWAYS
· Generate four new drafts or refine works-in-progress through in-class prompts.
· Receive detailed feedback from Dr. Anzalone and your peers in a supportive community.
· Build a flexible toolkit of forms for generating writing across genres.
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