(R)Evolution Pantoum: An Unconventional Craft Chronicle, or, Playing With Your Food

By Heidi Czerwiec

            After Brenda Miller’s “Pantoum for 1979”—and, really, after Brenda in so many ways

At the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
            —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets¹

Narrative, even in creative nonfiction, leaps forward, circles back, success in circuit. But ‘90s Utah, desert no dessert—as at other creative writing programs, the choice an or: fiction or poetry, narrative or lyric. A limited menu, prix fixe, the occasional à lá carte visiting writer, or nonfiction workshop taught by a dabbling faculty, and always, always, as a square meal of narrative. When offered, though, those classrooms stuffed, writers starved for it, nonfiction the neutral field on which we fed.

At the University of Utah, as elsewhere, students fed into fiction or—like me—to poetry. Then Brenda Miller was afforded, forded, foraged the first dissertation in creative nonfiction—a foretaste—though her degree notes none of this. At her defense, I recall the classroom stuffed, us writers starved for it. We hungered to see what she’d do next.

After Brenda broke the seal, things blurred a bit. Dawn Marano cultivating a taste for nonfiction at the University of Utah Press²; in course, Utah adding nonfiction to the spread, hiring Robin Hemley as a dedicated position. We hungered for what came next, couldn’t know how Robin and Nicole Walker (there then studying poetry) would nurture NonfictioNOW³. But that was then, and even then, lyric essays slow curing in Nicole’s head/cranium.

And not just Utah—other programs (Ohio, Nebraska, Eastern Washington, though not Iowa) added nonfiction to the spread. Phillip Lopate spread from teaching fiction to nonfiction, edited The Art of the Personal Essay⁴; Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre a pop-up of publishing. Deborah Tall coined the fusion cuisine “lyric essay.”⁵ Dinty W. Moore begat Brevity.⁶

Still, River Teeth’s subtitle is “A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative,” wouldn’t break Beautiful Things tiny milkteeth for fifteen years⁷; the selections in Lopate’s anthology firmly in narrative’s maw. At best, they ruminated through meditations, assayed and essayed a bit less logical. Even Dinty, in The Best of Brevity, claims his nascent mag considered only the compressed narrative.⁸ Soon, however, his concept of flash omnivorated.

But writers ruminated through meditation toward less logic, more lyric. Work labeled flash fiction, prose poems—at Quarterly West, when we didn’t know what to do with them, we published these delicacies as whatever the author preferred; the anthology In Short (Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones)⁹ proferred them in all their chimerical glory. By Y2K it was clear the possibilities were omnivorating. While Tell It Slant (Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola)¹⁰ presented a craft table of memoir and journalism, it also offered a taste of lyric essay.

Despite being labeled poets, writers—Elissa Gabbert, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine—were crafting delicacies no one knew what to do with. We devoured them like gathering breadcrumbs to trace a path, gorging on those leaping, circular forms. After Tell It Slant, Rose Metal Press (Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney)¹¹ added a leaf to the craft table, made a groaning board of those lyric essays and braids and hermit crabs. If it seems like women nourished much of this work—they did, they do—I don’t know what it means but it sustains me.

Devouring those early poets-turned-essayists, I could trace a path for my own work, as I gorged on Doyle’s Leaping¹², on Lee Ann Roripaugh’s haibun and zuihitsu¹³. I browsed poetic genres and conventions, bending them to prose. I read for sustenance, this stuff by women, to realize, astounded, spun around, that my favorite Annie Dillard book, Holy the Firm, is a book-length lyric essay, an evolutionary leap forward in 1977.¹⁴ But, like anything, the writing aged ahead of the critical work explaining how.

Bending Genres (edited by Nicole Walker and Margot Singer and featuring a lot of Utah expats)¹⁵ tried, and succeeded, at feeding us some answers. Even Lopate argued “The Lyric Essay” in his update To Show and to Tell¹⁶ (spoiler: he’s agin’ it). All that writing, finally nibbling at how. In 2015, NonfictioNOW had a couple panels on hybrids; in 2018, a smorgasbord.¹⁷

And yet, in 2020, my grad students at the University of Minnesota argued the lyric essay (spoiler: they’re agin’ it), not for inability to digest, but fed up, glutted on it. Utah now offers a feast of “fiction, nonfiction, poetry, digital writing, hybrid and other experimental forms, [and] book arts.”¹⁸ In 2018 at NonfictioNOW, invited to the table, I presented on a hybrid panel¹⁹ (mostly women) on poetic forms imported into nonfiction and cited Brenda, present in the audience, got to thank her for setting that table. This is not to say all is sweetness: recently, Ander Monson addressed other judges’ distaste for lyric essay in NEA grant decisions²⁰ (spoiler: they’re agin’ it).

Creative writing programs and syllabus cellars at Assay²¹ and elsewhere now offer a feast for teaching and studying, an entire palette of genres for every palate. Far from the food desert of the ‘90s, us gone undernourished, the limited menu prix fixe poetry and fiction; the only sips of nonfiction, narrative. Despite this, narrative nonfiction still gets the grants, the agents and advances, the main entrée on the buffet (I prefer to make a meal of hors d’oeuvres, am always eyeing what’s being circulated on the platters). But as we see, even narrative circles back, awaits the great leap forward.
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Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the 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, and the poetry collection Conjoining. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

__________________

Sources:

1. Eliot, T.S., “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Print.

2.  https://www.dawnmarano.com/

3. http://www.nonfictionow.org/the-board

4. Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay. New York: Anchor Books, 1995

5. Tall, Deborah and John D’Agata, Foreword to Seneca Review (Fall 1997). Print. Archived online at                 https://www.hws.edu/senecareview/lyricessay.aspx

6. https://brevitymag.com/about-brevity/

7. https://www.riverteethjournal.com/online-content/beautiful-things

8. Moore, Dinty W. “On Voice, Concision, and 20 Years of Flash Nonfiction.” The Best of Brevity, ed. Zöe Bossiere                and Dinty W. Moore. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2020. Print.

9. Jones, Mary Paumier and Judith Kitchen, eds., In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction. Norton: 1996. Print.

10. Miller, Brenda and Suzanne Paola, eds., Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. New York:          McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print.

11. https://rosemetalpress.com/about-us/

12. Doyle, Brian. Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2003. Print.

13. Roripaugh, Lee Ann. Running Brush. Website. https://runningbrush.wordpress.com/

14. Dillard, Annie. Holy the Firm. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Print.

15. Singer, Margot and Nicole Walker, eds. Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. New York:       Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

16. Lopate, Phillip, “The Lyric Essay.” To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonficton. New York: Free          Press, 2013.

17. https://assayjournal.wordpress.com/category/conference-reports/

18. https://english.utah.edu/graduate/creative-writing.php

19. https://assayjournal.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/nfn18-the-essay-as-unstrung-lyre/

20. Monson, Ander, “Dear Essayists Applying for an NEA.” Essay Daily (16 Feb 2021)

https://www.essaydaily.org/2021/02/dear-essayists-applying-for-nea.html

21. https://www.assayjournal.com/in-the-classroom.html

The Alloy of Hybrid Prose: Rose Metal’s 10th Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest

From our fine friends at Rose Metal Press (aka the amazing Abby and Kathleen):

Submit, All Ye Faithful! Joyful and Hybrid-umphant!

From November 1 through December 1, we’re holding our 10^th Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest reading period, so it’s time to gather your best flash (1,000 words or less) and compile them into an amazing 25-40-page manuscript. Flash fiction and flash nonfiction welcome.

If our contest were having a wedding anniversary, it’d be the tin/aluminum one, which seems coincidentally fitting since our press is named after a metal, Rose Metal, an alloy typically used to solder things together. This act of blending two things to make something new has always struck us as apt given our aims as a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres.

To celebrate a decade of our contest, one of the first and few chapbook contests for prose, this year we’re offering a monetary prize to the winner. In addition to having his/her manuscript published as a limited edition chapbook with letterpressed covers and an introduction by the contest judge—the fabulous Ira Sukrungruang—this year’s winner will receive $200.

It’s been an inspiring 10 years of reading many worthy submissions and seeing what gem of a manuscript the judge selects. Past winners include Claudia Smith, Geoffrey Forsyth, Sean Lovelace, Mary Hamilton, Tiff Holland, Aaron Teel, Kim Henderson, Todd Seabrook, and Rosie Forrest, whose chapbooks you can read about in our catalog.  (http://rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/catalog.html)

We look forward to seeing who Ira will choose as our 10th winner. It could be you—but not if you don’t submit! Learn more about the contest and submit by Dec. 1 here. (http://rosemetalpress.com/Submit/Submit.html)

Top 10 Reasons Why “Navigating Emptiness: Benefits and Drawbacks of Teaching the Lyric Essay” Was A Great Panel

by Sally Ashton

10. Smart Women Panelists

The scheduled mixed-gender panel of four turned out to be three women, three very smart women well-suited to the discussion of the “lyric essay’s delight in gaps, association, and the unknown,” a panel who also presented effective teaching strategies. Panelists included moderator and editor of Rose Metal Press, Kathleen Rooney; Dr. Nicole Walker, Northern Arizona University; and Dr. Julie Paegle, Associate Professor of Poetry at California State University San Bernardino.

9. A Hot Topic

Lyric Essay. This brief form might be voted Most Popular AWP Concept 2014 if you take into account the number of panels devoted to any murky combination of short form considerations. I counted thirteen, though more might have been lurking behind cleverer titles.

8. Best Neologism to Replace Clunky “Cross-Genre-Hybrid-Form-Trans-Blended-Flash-Shorts-Lyric-Essay” Terminology

Thanks to Kathleen Rooney for introducing “Open Form Essay,” and for explaining how she arrived at a term whose definition enacts what it names. She says the term occurred to her after reading Naked Poetry, a 1969 anthology, Stephen Berg, ed.

7. Concrete Tips

See also: #2, Handouts.

6. Sample Assignments

Well-articulated assignments accompanied by either clear instructions or detailed handouts made this panel’s take-away value high. Assignments included “imitation” assignments from readings; working with the Petrarchan sonnet as an generating structure for a piece; and writing secrets, one true and one false that both appear to be true, to be redistributed and serve as a prompt for another student’s essay.

5. Cool Recommended Texts

The texts were chosen to serve in specific themed courses, but having titles listed in the syllabi helped me to better envision the connections each instructor was looking to make. Three books that I felt I would read anyway were A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)Tics, by C.A. Conrad; Dreamtigers, by Borges (I’ve read only selections); and The Noisy Egg, poetry by panelist Nicole Walker. The panelists did seem to be teaching the lyric essay in a cross-genre fashion for the most part, and this was reflected in their hybrid booklists.

4. Good Hybrid Form Apologists

I guess we’re always anxious to know the why of everything and this panel revealed a number of reasons why a hybrid approach is a good strategy for teaching grad and undergrad student writers. Panelists variously claimed that this mode was useful for grads to cross-fertilize their “home” genre, that a short form can serve more concisely as a teaching model for how to understand and manipulate a text, that the open form lends itself to manageable self-reflection, and that in certain student populations it can be empowering for students to realize they can use literary strategies to process trauma.

3. A Well-organized Presentation

At 9am on an AWP-Friday morning, clear and useful presentations full of ideas and hewing to time limitations that also allow ample time for Q&A makes you glad you answered the alarm instead of sleeping through it. Like you wanted to. They were a fast-paced, smart, and superbly prepared panel.

2. Helpful Handouts

You might feel like a shopper at a sale table when an AWP panel offers a handout. Mine! These Navigators offered three. I especially appreciated that at least one panelist brought an assistant to insure the sheets were evenly distributed and that there were enough handouts for the entire group. Except for the last handout that proved to be one short. Mine. However, these panelists offered to email material to those who missed (tip to future panelists: we are writers, after all. We will read and likely hoard the stuff). Handouts include complete course syllabi as well as lists of course texts and a couple of assignments.

And the TOP reason “Navigating Emptiness: Benefits and Drawbacks of Teaching the Lyric Essay” was so good:

1. Smart Women Panelists Who Said the Following Memorable Near-quotes

Nicole, in regards to instructing students, stressed that they need to “ground floating thoughts . . . Thoughts need an audience. (I tell them) your thoughts need to be seen as a character. Put yourself in a character on the page.” Kathleen, defending her term “Open Form Essay,” stressed the need to avoid designation that over-determines the writing before it’s written, but instead to “allow form to develop organically. To let content shape the piece.” Julie, in discussing the tension inherent in lyric’s epiphanic transport and narrative’s movement through time, said that the lyric essay can be thought of as “a time machine that renegotiates suspended time.” Besides being intelligent writers, they were friendly, engaged, and generous. Thank you, all.

—

Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review (www.dmqreview.com), an online journal featuring poetry and art. She is the author of three poetry books, and she has just completed Behaviour of Clocks, a hybrid collection. Ashton teaches at San Jose State University and in Disquiet International Literary Program, Lisbon. http://disquietinternational.org/

So Much More Self There: Ander Monson on Truth in Nonfiction

Writer/Rose Metal editor Kathleen Rooney interviewed Ander Monson in Redivider some years ago, but we just ran across it this morning, and the interview is a fine one indeed. Monson never fails to be interesting, and Rooney keeps the questions sharp and focused.  Here, she asks, “Why does ‘truth’ matter in creative non-fiction? How does it matter? Does it matter?”

AM: It matters because readers feel like it matters. It matters because James Frey got bitch-slapped on national television, because JT LeRoy got sued. It matters because your dad doesn’t really want to show up in your essay. It matters because it’s harder for writers (or, well, me) to write nonfiction, or that it should be for all of us, because there’s so much more self there (especially in essay, and in memoir, don’t even get me started; perhaps we should just stop writing memoirs unless we are ready to sever most of our relationships with the people we write about). And because nonfiction comes without the shroud of invulnerability that fiction implies. The essay or the nonfiction book is about real people. It has claims on factual truth that nothing else does. And the people who show up in my, or anyone’s, nonfiction can track me down and tell me what they think. And they will.

The entire interview can be found right here: —Ander Monson, interviewed by Kathleen Rooney for Redivider

In Defense of the Young Memoirist: A Summer Reading Guide

A guest post from our friend Joey Franklin (not pictured below):

Recently, the editors at Oprah’s O Magazine published a snappy summer reading guide called “O’s Declaration of Reader Independence”—a freedom-ringing ten-point manifesto against summer reading “group-think.”

The list includes such liberating notions as

• #2: the right “to see the movie first,”
• #7: the right to “be miffed if your friend doesn’t like a book you recommend,” and
• #9: the right to “declare yourself unmoved by the existential struggles of vampires.”

While much of O’s manifesto feels right, I’m a little skeptical of #8, the right to “ignore memoirs by people who have barely cracked their 30s.” Certainly readers have that right, and certainly anyone can understand why Oprah’s magazine might encourage its readers to avoid young memoirists (particularly the recovering drug addict types), but the many babies thrown out with that bathwater deserve a little more consideration than the article suggests.

So to Oprah’s readers and to anyone else who may be feeling a little wary of young memoirists, I offer five books that challenge the notion that twenty- and thirtysomething writers have little to offer the reading public:

1. Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss. Winner of the Graywolf Prize for Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. David Shields called Notes “An utterly beautiful and deeply serious performance.”

2. For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs, by Kathleen Rooney. Katherine Boyle wrote, “Echoing Joan Didion’s The White Album, Rooney’s personal essays turn into a freeze-frame of life in the U.S.”

3. Opa Nobody, by Sonya Huber. Shortlisted for the Saroyan prize. Lee Martin said, “Opa Nobody is a brave book of politics, history, and love—a book filled with an irrepressible embrace of humanity.”

4. Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, by Ander Monson. Another Graywolf Prize winner. Steven Poole of the Guardian wrote that Monson “has a miniaturist, free-associative humour, which is what you want in an essayist.”

5. What Becomes You, by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz. According to Floyd Skloot, “What Becomes You is a radically strange, deeply moving, unique book, a mother and child story like none you’ve ever read.”

And, of course, there are many, many more.

Do you know one that should be on this list? Let us know.

Happy summer reading.

The Further Perils of Memoir

From The Washington Post:

Kathleen Rooney, a staffer for Sen. Dick Durbin, was fired earlier this month after the release of her latest book, “For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.” The autobiographical essays include three chapters about working in a Senate office: insider gossip, staff secrets and a complicated flirtation between the author and her boss, Durbin’s state director in Illinois.

Rooney, 29, has always blended politics and writing. She started as a summer intern in the Democratic senator’s Chicago office in 1999, worked two more summers, then returned full time as a Senate aide in 2007. Along the way, the GW grad published four other books: “Reading With Oprah,” two collections of poetry and a memoir about working as an artist’s model.

The prose hit the fan after Joe Shoemaker, Durbin’s spokesman, saw a short review of the essay collection last month in The Washington Post and bought the book.

“She was a low-level staffer who wasn’t paid very much,” he told us. “She was trying to make a name for herself in literary circles. The office wasn’t going to stand in her way in furthering her career as long as she was able to do her job for us.” He knew about an upcoming novel, but said he had no idea about the essays.

Although no one was named, Shoemaker was disturbed that she had written about the office and especially concerned about the relationship between Rooney and her supervisor: “Once upon a time there was a girl in unrequitable (but not unrequited) love with her boss,” she wrote. “He would place his hand at the base of her neck, or flick her earring, or twist a strand of her hair…”

“