Social Justice Lyric Essay
WRA 101: Writing as Inquiry
Spring 2017
“One subgenre of the personal essay—the ‘lyric essay’—seems especially to suffer from an identity crisis. The term is applied to anything short, anything (of any length) that uses poetic language, anything (of any length) that employs the mosaic technique, anything (of any length) experimental, and, for want of a better word, anything we might dub ‘clever.’”
– Judith Kitchen, “Grounding the Lyric Essay” in Fourth Genre 13.2
“The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.”
– Deborah Tall, The Seneca Review
Personal narratives use the interplay of storytelling, reflection, and analysis to not only convey real life events, but also show readers their larger meaning. For class, we read excerpts from Michelle Cruz Gonzales’ memoir The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. The chapters in this book were each personal narratives that transform the experience of being in the band, making it meaningful to a larger audience. All good stories answer the question, “so what?”
Project 1 invites you to create an untraditional style of personal narrative called a lyric essay. Lyric essays play with form in order to approach the story’s subject or themes in a poetic, non-linear, or multi-vocal way. Rather than proceeding from A-B-C in a linear narrative, lyric essays use the stylistic devices of poetry: creative play between structure and content; rhythm; brevity; white space; image and metaphor. Lyric essays make use of creative structural and stylistic choices to access complex material in a unique way.
Write a lyric essay about a social justice issue of your choice. Your lyric essay must focus on a true story from your own life, though you need not be the main character. We will begin by unpacking what creative nonfiction writers Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola call “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form” (scene and place, character, point of view, action) writing a linear narrative about social justice. Then, we will learn about different forms of lyric essays (braided, segmented, mosaic) and you will make some intentional choices about the most effective shape for your lyric essay.
A companion piece (prompt to come) will accompany your lyric essay, discussing the purposeful choices you made in your writing process about invention and arrangement.
Format: 3-5 pages minimum; MLA Style format, header, and page numbers (go here for details on MLA Style Basic Format
Points: 100 points
