Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney founded Rose Metal Press in 2006 “to support innovative hybrid writing and provide a publishing home for transgressive, unusual, and hard-to-categorize literary projects.” In addition to exciting hybrid work, the press has published an award-winning series of invaluable Field Guides to writing flash fiction, flash nonfiction, prose poetry, and graphic literature. I’ve taught flash and creative nonfiction workshops with The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction and loved both of them. Each includes craft essays, writing prompts, and sample essays from a wide array of practitioners in the field. 

I also own and treasure many books from Rose Metal Press. After interviewing Naomi Cohn in CRAFT about her award-winning abecedarian memoir The Braille Encyclopedia (Rose Metal Press, 2024), I attended the press’s panel on “Writing with Creative Constraints” at the AWP Conference in Los Angeles because I wanted to meet her in person. The panel, moderated by Kathleen Rooney and featuring Naomi along with Darien Gee, Sharon De La Cruz, and Tom McAllister, was stupendous. I came away with insights into book-length projects using creative constraints that helped me immeasurably as I organized my hybrid essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball (now forthcoming from Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press), and that inspired me to think about future projects. I was sorry when it was over! I appreciated Tom McAllister’s follow-up roundtable discussion with Naomi and Darien in Electric Literature. He launched their conversation by pointing out what prose writers can learn from the creative constraints and formal restrictions in poetry, opening the door to further thinking about hybrid forms such as the lyric essay.

A devoted fan of the lyric essay (as a writer, reader, and teacher), I’ve been looking forward to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay for what feels like a long time. It does not disappoint. Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh have chosen twenty-five essays from a wide range of lyric essayists. Here’s the full list: Chelsea Biondolillo, KJ Cerankowski, Ching-In Chen, Oliver de la Paz, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Camille T. Dungy, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rigoberto González, torrin a. greathouse, Kimiko Hahn, Lily Hoàng, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Rowan McCandless, Sarah Minor, Rajiv Mohabir, Vi Khi Nào, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Natanya Ann Pulley, Diane Seuss, Sun Yung Shin, Brian Turner, Katrina Vandenberg, Julie Marie Wade, chaun webster, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, and Marco Wilkinson.

As in the other Rose Metal Press Field Guides, each writer has contributed a craft essay, a writing prompt, and a sample essay (in this guide, an example from their own work). They cover myriad aspects of the lyric essay, which the publisher lists in detail: “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).” Heidi and Lee have divided the essays into ten sections that range from the lyric “I” to gaps and white spaces, sonic repetition, visual poetics, and long forms.

There are far too many brilliant essays and prompts to mention here. I hope you will all read the book! I was pleased to see Chelsea Biondolillo’s hybrid lyric essay “Weeds,” first published (with her color illustrations) in CRAFT, and a contribution by Julie Marie Wade, because her focus on speculative nonfiction in the closing section is particularly relevant to what I’ve been writing (as is chaun webster’s piece on unstable archival histories), and because we’ve published two of Julie’s flash-length lyric essays in CRAFT. “I associate the lyric essay with the most flexible and capacious experiments that prose can accommodate,” she writes in her essay in the Field Guide, “not only with techniques like braiding, collage, fragmentation, and recursion, though certainly those—but also with the deepest permissions a writer can take to plumb speculative and surreal spaces.” 

Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh are both poets who also write prose, making them particularly well suited to guide writers through the largely unexplored terrain of thinking about, teaching, and writing the lyric essay. Along with books of poetry, Heidi has published a lyric essay collection Fluid States, and a number of craft essays on the lyric essay (some lyric essays in themselves), many gathered into her collection Crafting the Lyric Essay (which includes a piece originally published in CRAFT). In addition to many collections of poetry, Lee has published two collections of lyric essays, Dandarians and unMothered, unTongued. Heidi and Lee open their Field Guide with a substantial introduction on evolving definitions of the lyric essay and have appended a number of lists for further reading, including craft guides and anthologies, individual lyric essays, lyric essay collections, and visual lyric essay collections. Whether you’re a writer, teacher, or student, you’ll want to get your hands on this book.

I am grateful to Heidi and Lee for taking time to answer these questions via email.

—Jacqueline Doyle

 

Jacqueline Doyle: In interviews, Heidi, you’ve mentioned Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm as your first encounter, or one of your first encounters, with the lyric essay. Could you describe that reading experience and what attracted you in the book? Lee, do you remember a first encounter that awakened you to the possibilities of the lyric essay before there was a term to describe it?

Heidi Czerwiec: Jacqueline, thank you so much for that generous intro and for your thoughtful engagement with this book. A good friend in high school gifted me Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, which I loved, so I was making my way through all her titles. While Holy the Firm shared the same intelligence and linguistic style of the others, the experience of reading it was a revelation. Although a slender volume, the language is dense with elemental imagery and symbolism, with phrases and moments that loop back and linked throughout her account of a summer on the Puget Sound in a way that reads more like a tightly crafted poem. I’ve returned to it repeatedly, but I didn’t have the language to articulate what it was doing for more than twenty years. Coincidentally, that later awakening to lyric nonfiction as an actual thing that maybe I could do in my own writing happened after reading Lee’s Dandarians, which is why it’s meant so much to me to work with her on this project.

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh: Ah, thank you, Heidi! I, too, had a similar revelatory response to Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm. The intensity and (terrible) beauty of the imagery/symbolism, and the musicality of the language, as well as the ways in which the triptych structure invites the reader to make connections between these sharply juxtaposed vignettes, all felt like techniques that I recognized and loved and understood from poetry and it opened up an entire aperture of possibilities for what an essay might be or do for me. Another essay that had a profound influence on me was Geeta Kothari’s segmented essay, “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” I absolutely fell in love with the ways in which this essay, through sharply juxtaposed short vignettes about immigrant identity and food, did such powerful and amazing work creating complex strands of connection exploring food as cultural language and knowledge, as assimilation, as belonging, as cultural capital. It’s such a brilliant essay, but the reader is allowed to form their own critical understanding of the work the text is doing simply through presentation of the series of moving, sometimes hilarious, vignettes without an excess of exposition, or reducing the complexities of the essay into a neatly contained single narrative. For me, it revealed a way of writing essays that was lyric in form and strategy, and offered a model that I found both aspirational and accessible.

 

JD: The lyric essay may be more difficult to define than the subjects of the other Rose Metal Press Guides. As Heidi pointed out in her interview with Amy Scheiner in CRAFT, the term “lyric essay” has been loosely applied to anything “short and kind of quirky.” It developed, as you write in your introduction, an “anything-goes reputation.” Could you offer a more precise working definition of the lyric essay here for those who haven’t read your book yet? 

HC and LHR: Lee came up with the fantastic description of the lyric essay as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in the sense of you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter, and there have been some great definitions offered by Deborah Tall, Judith Kitchen, and Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola Antonetta. But the most concise and precise definition we came up with is that the lyric essay is creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function (that is, written in lyric mode), meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language—to resonances of sound, including silence and white space, and imagery, including that which transcends mere description and either deepens or opens out into metaphor or symbol. In other words, to paraphrase Judith Kitchen, there must be the presence of a lyre.

 

JD: I love your lively and informative introduction. I’m always interested in collaborative writing, and I’m curious about your process. (Black Lawrence Press has a great anthology, They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, where the contributors all describe what it was like to write their collaborative pieces. There’s quite a range.) Did you each write separate sections of the introduction, or collaborate in some other fashion? Were there areas where you initially disagreed? Did you exchange ideas and writing in person, via email, using Zoom?

HC and LHR: Ha! That’s a great question. We’ve each long been fans of each other’s work, so we were thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate on this Field Guide. In the earliest stages, as we were conceptualizing this project, we emailed extensively trying to lay the groundwork for how we defined the lyric essay and whose writing we loved and what we wanted to accomplish. When it came time to write the introduction, Heidi went back and found that first email thread and cut-and-pasted a lot of it into a blank document. While we knew that there was a loose formula for what Rose Metal Press wanted the intro to do, that initial conversation shaped the heart of it and, we think, captures some of that passion and playfulness. 

We did divide up certain chunks for drafting—Heidi took history and definitions since she’d already covered them in her own recent craft book, and Lee took the contemporary scene and the overview of the contents—but we revised together. Most of our work took place via email, but we would periodically call or Zoom when work got particularly fiddly or frustrating. 

Neither of us can really remember ever disagreeing, although each of us would raise points or suggest approaches the other hadn’t considered, which was amazing. We both learned so much from working together. Ultimately, we felt like we were able to mutually enrich the collaboration, but also had each other’s backs when needed. 

 

JD: Did you solicit contributions to the book, or select contributions after a general call for submissions? In either case, how did you go about selecting authors to include? Did you make suggestions for shaping the essays?

HC and LHR: By this point, five volumes in, Rose Metal Press has the Field Guide format pretty honed. The volume editors (us, in this case) solicit all contributors, suggest or work with them to identify a topic so that there’s a range of content and no overlaps, and help shape drafts so that each trio of craft essay/exercise/example all work together with a tight focus on one particular lyric essay craft element or strategy. Selecting authors to invite was an interesting exercise—the lyric essay doesn’t have an extensive, established history, so the same few names were being referenced and cited. We absolutely give those authors their flowers in our intro, but in the interests of trying to expand the craft conversation, we wanted to invite newer voices to the discussion, writers whose work is advancing the field in fascinating ways. We started by each compiling our own wish list and then comparing names—happily, many of the names were the same! But we also each came up with writers that the other was like, “Oh, I love ___ and can’t believe I didn’t think of them!” We worked through the invitations, and while there were some wonderful writers who had to send regrets, we’re thrilled with the lineup for this project, representing a range of perspectives and styles and superpowers.

 

JD: Having recently organized an essay collection into sections with subtitles, I can attest that it’s much harder than it looks. Did you have your organization in mind from the beginning, or did the ten sections arise from the material? You describe four “groupings” in your introduction: “general introduction to the lyric essay, sound patterning, structures/shaping, and writing beyond.” Could you say more about the content and sequence of sections?

LHR and HC: We agree with you—this was one of the most difficult aspects for us, too! We had some general lyric essay topics in mind from the very beginning that we knew we wanted to cover—forms, techniques, and processes/conceptual approaches—and many authors’ pieces largely fell into those groupings, but some developed as we went, and some we shuffled around to create interesting juxtapositions or conversations. But the idea behind the final progression was to start with craft that encourages experimentation with the lyric essay, then move into lyric strategies that use patterns of sound and/or silence and white space, then explore different ways of structuring the lyric essay such as incorporating poetic forms or visual design, and finish with methods that push the boundaries of creative nonfiction by imagining alternative possibilities. But we recognize that, in our own and others’ past experiences with the other Field Guides—and even how you yourself, Jacqueline, described your first encounter with this book!—readers and instructors tend to jump around among the contributor essays, picking and choosing from what’s useful or interesting or appealing to them. As lyric essayists, we also endorse this nonlinear, leaping impulse.

 

JD: In the introduction, you write that for Lee, the lyric essay “fully embodies her biracial, LGBTQIA+, and neurodivergent identities,” identities that many of your contributors share. Some contributors to the collection also explore the lyric essay as a vehicle for writing about their chronic illness, disabled bodies, and racial bodies. Could you say more about the potential of the lyric essay for writers from these and other marginalized communities? 

LHR: I’m especially drawn to the ways in which lyric essays reflect the marginal, liminal, fluid, and uncategorizable aspects of my own embodiment, my own intersectional, biracial, and genderqueer identities. The aesthetic potential of hybrid forms, I feel, including lyric essays, challenges the “master narratives” of genre that are deeply entrenched within and policed by a Western patriarchal literary tradition. Their fluid categorizations resist being pinned down or mastered into institutionalized and potentially essentialized forms of knowledge, and they resist, as well, the essentialisms of easy commodification. Like other forms of hybridity, lyric essays seem fluid, queer, and transgressive, and they also provide a formal space that allows room to address the complexity of these identities without flattening them down into the potential reductiveness of a single linear narrative.

 

JD: While there are no restrictions on subject matter in lyric essays, do some subjects lend themselves particularly to the lyric essay? In an interview with Matthew Thorburn in Ploughshares, Lee suggested that the lyric essay became their chosen form in Dandarians because of what they were writing about: “Also, given that this manuscript was addressing hybridity of language, as well as fluidities of identity (ethnicity, gender, orientation, etc.) it made sense to me that this was a project best served by hybrid forms.” KJ Cerankowski, among other writers in the collection, contends that “the lyric essay, with its reliance on repetition and sensory language play (sound, rhythm, rhyme, consonance, assonance, alliteration) lends itself perfectly to writing trauma.” Could you discuss the interplay of content with the forms, strategies, and techniques characteristic of the lyric essay? 

HC: Lee gives a great answer above about the lyric essay’s affinity for content on the issue of identity, especially for those writing between or across identities. To add to that, it seems like the lyric essay also pairs well with content that is complicated and not totally understood but sensed, and that’s experienced both in the mind/intellect and in the body. The highly patterned use of language in lyric writing, like the strategies you name above, can be useful for discovering or revealing patterns in the content or experience, or can help the writer impose order on what otherwise feels like chaos. The often nonlinear movement of a lyric essay may feel truer to the writer’s experience, accruing by fragments of text or images that gain meaning by association and by repetition, creating a composite portrait that more accurately captures its complexity. And the fact that so many different kinds of content—personal experience, research, history, visual elements, speculative elements, etc.—can be incorporated, either singly or all together in the same essay, allows for a multiplicity of effects and approaches. But because so many of these lyric strategies—repetitions of sound, sensory imagery, silence/white space—are experienced in the body, there’s that embodied aspect to reading the lyric essay as well. I feel like I’m just waxing Shelleyan at this point, so I’ll just leave it that when that interplay of content, form, technique, etc. are perfectly attuned, they all amplify each other in ways that engage the reader at every level simultaneously. 

 

JD: As you point out, this book can be used in many ways: by individual writers interested in writing lyric essays or incorporating lyric strategies in their writing as well as by teachers at multiple levels (high school, undergraduate, graduate) who teach the lyric essay in multi-genre classes or creative nonfiction workshops. I love that you’ve deliberately arranged the book so that it could be used as a semester-long course on the lyric essay, with the table of contents as a syllabus! (It’s probably too early to ask: has anyone tried that yet?) Could you share some classroom experiences that you or your colleagues or contributors have had with teaching the lyric essay?

LHR: I was able to design and regularly teach an upper-division class in hybrid/mixed-genre writing, and it regularly yielded some of the freshest, most interesting work from my creative writing students, including amazing lyric essays. I think the use of lyric strategies in prose forms encouraged them to be artful, inventive, and intentional in their language and in their aesthetic choices, but at the same time it freed them from preconceived notions about genre that can lead writers to drift toward trying to replicate predictable, dated, or cliched notions about poetry and narrative.

HC: I can tell you that the students I teach at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop are absolutely obsessed with the lyric essay. Many of them have taken workshops in multiple genres, but they’re excited by the freedom of blending genres. Also, each of the women has experienced trauma, and as discussed earlier, many of the lyric strategies described by the contributing authors such as patterns of repetition, or fragments and/or white space, are useful for representing traumatic experiences. They’ve been trying to tell their stories, and this gives them a new set of tools and a nonlinear approach that makes sense to them.

I think it’s too early for anyone to have used this text in a course, but Katrina Vandenberg, one of the contributors in this book, is using the Field Guide in an online workshop she’s teaching through Orion Magazine this fall.

 

JD: With twenty-five writing prompts in the book and your own wealth of experience teaching the lyric essay, this may not be a fair question, but could you each offer a short writing prompt that has been particularly successful in your classrooms? 

LHR: I’ve had amazing responses to this particular exercise, which is to write a “countdown flash essay” inspired by Michael Wasson’s poem, “Countdown as Slow Kisses.” The first step in the prompt is to read (and listen to) Wasson’s poem at The Academy of American Poets. Michael Wasson is a poet who creates intensity through understanding quiet/silence, and through deliberate pacing, and this is very powerfully revealed through appropriating the form of a countdown as a hermit crab form. Using Wasson’s poem as a model, write your own countdown flash essay counting down from 10 to 0. You may wish to emulate or explore the lovely, but slightly surreal imagery, that resists literalism or narrative, as Wasson does here, when you create your countdown. In some respects, the countdown is a kind of list, or listing, but I think it differs from a list poem in that it creates an expectation of increasing and building tension or intensity in the poem. A movement from margin/distance to a molten core or center. Part of the challenge, then, of the countdown poem is ratcheting up the tension, bit by bit, until you arrive at 0, and then there is an explosion, or a blast-off, of sorts!

HC: I was introduced to haibun by Lee’s work, and it’s been a hit with my students. The haibun is a short form of lyric prose popularized by Bashō in seventeenth-century Japan that incorporates at some point at least one haiku—a seventeen-syllable poem that’s both ephemeral and a distillation, an attempt to capture a fleeting moment. The sense of smell is also both ephemeral and a distillation, and a powerful entry point to memory. The prompt is: Write a haiku (three lines that total seventeen syllables—does not need to be in the five/seven/five pattern) that vividly describes a smell you have a powerful association with (positive or negative). After you finish, go back and write a short prose piece around that smell—what scene or circumstances from your memory surround it? Where in the haibun should the haiku occur—at what point does the haibun distill to this moment? Once you have a draft of the full haibun, review it—where might you amplify the lyric language by adding resonances of sound effects and imagery?

 

JD: In your introduction you write, “We’ve been thrilled to see the lyric essay enjoying widespread popularity in recent years,” pointing to the increasing number of venues for publishing lyric essays. Could you list some of those here for writers seeking to place their lyric essays and readers looking to read more? Do you have any theories about why the lyric essay is becoming popular at this point in literary history (and history)?

HC and LHR: Brevity, DIAGRAM, Seneca Review, Sweet, and the “Beautiful Things” feature at River Teeth all publish short lyric essays, and many journals will publish longer/longform ones, notably Orion, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, and others. To read more, there are only a few anthologies that focus on the lyric essay—all recent, all excellent: A Harp in the Stars, Shapes of Native Nonfiction, and The Lyric Essay as Resistance. Presses that publish exquisite lyric essay collections (for those looking for either venues or reading suggestions) include Rose Metal Press, Sarabande, Wave Books, Red Hen, Rescue Press, the University of Georgia Press (particularly the CRUX series), and that Minneapolis trifecta of Graywolf, Coffee House Press, and Milkweed.

HC: To answer your second question for myself, I think hybrid writing of all kinds, including the lyric essay, is especially popular right now because everything is more volatile and in flux—the old systems and rigid definitions are failing us, and there’s no singular, unified way to represent our experiences. For the lyric essay in particular, I think it’s been a way for poets to engage in a more expansive and sustained way with nonfiction materials, reaching an audience in a way that a ten-plus page poem might not.

LHR: I absolutely agree with Heidi. I might also add that traditional forms, because of their codifiability and their recognizability, have the potential to resist nuance, and possibly don’t reflect the complexity of contemporary experience, contemporary lives. I think this is one of the reasons for the increased interest in narratives that kick out the fourth wall, in metafictional and historiographic metafictional narratives, as well as in inventive genre forms and shapes over the course of the last half-century. For these reasons, traditional genre structures more easily run the risk of replicating or possibly echoing “master narratives,” which are the false and falsely constructed narratives of empire, colonization, capitalism, manifest destiny and other centrist narratives that create false binaries of center and margin, self and other, oppressors and oppressed. 

 

JD: I love hearing your thoughts on the lyric essay and this collection! The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay is a wonderful addition to the Press’s other Field Guides. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions.

HC and LHR: Thank you so much for this conversation!

 

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HEIDI CZERWIEC, essayist and poet, is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord (2024), and the lyric essay collection Fluid States (2019), selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’s 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, as well as several poetry collections, including Conjoining (2017) and Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (2013). She is also the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015), and a senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis for the University of Minnesota, Normandale Community College, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Find her on Facebook @heidi.czerwiec.1.

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LEE HORIKOSHI RORIPAUGH (she/they) is a biracial Nisei whose most recent book, unMothered, unTongued (2025), won the 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the AWP Award Series. They are also the author of a fiction collection, Reveal Codes (2023), winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award; a chapbook, #stringofbeads (2023), winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition; and five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of The National Poetry Series. A professor emeritus of English at the University of South Dakota, they live in Atlanta, Georgia, and Laramie, Wyoming, and currently serve as a faculty mentor at the Carlow University and University of Nebraska low-residency MFA programs. Find them on Facebook @lee.roripaugh.

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JACQUELINE DOYLE has published essays in The Gettysburg Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Fourth Genre, and hybrid prose from her forthcoming essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press) in EPOCH, Passages North, and Permafrost. Her work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations and nine Notable citations in Best American Essays. (Her first Notable appeared in South Dakota Review, where Lee was editor-in-chief.) A professor emerita at California State University, East Bay, she has also published numerous scholarly articles (including an essay combining scholarship, pedagogy, and creative writing in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, where Heidi is an editor). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and currently serves as the creative nonfiction flash editor at CRAFT. Find her on Substack @jacquelinedoyle2.substack.com.