Interview: Heidi Czerwiec
I started writing lyric essays long before I knew the language for what I was doing. Working at the intersection of poetry and prose, I wrote about big emotions (love, grief) because I wasn’t sure how else to convey the experience. I wasn’t sure how to write about my childhood trauma or the sudden, untimely death of my mother. Prose felt insufficient and poetry felt overwhelming. Then, in graduate school, I read “Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch and “Math 1619” by Gwendolyn Wallace, and I discovered this genre-bending medium had a name. In her new book, Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, Heidi Czerwiec speaks to the elusive concepts of the lyric essay, a form that has been gaining popularity among poets and prose writers. In a work that both defines and deconstructs, Czerwiec’s fifteen-essay collection embodies the recursive nature of the lyric essay, shifting in time while layering new meaning and ideas. I had a very enjoyable conversation with Heidi over Zoom about the genesis of Crafting the Lyric Essay, the language of lyric, and the future of craft.
—Amy Scheiner
Amy Scheiner: In your introduction, you recall a conversation with Karen Babine in which she says: “You need to explain how lyric craft is being used in creative nonfiction, because not enough people are doing it and we need it.” I thought this was a very compelling place to open your book, and it feels like a call to action. Do you see it as that? And can you talk more about the “need” Karen mentions?
Heidi Czerwiec: That’s a great question. I did include that quotation partly because I felt sort of silly writing the book because I wasn’t saying anything new. I’m just referencing all these poets and critics who are writing lyric theory and lyric craft and applying it to the essay as a form, but I didn’t invent any of these techniques. These aren’t my ideas. And so, I sort of had to be strong-armed into writing the book because, as in the section that you quoted, Karen was saying, “Yeah, but people aren’t applying it to the essay, and we need more of this.” Karen and I were both thinking about craft stuff because we just felt like there’s not enough craft writing on nonfiction relative to what exists for poetry and fiction.
We’ve got hundreds of years of fiction, more than that of narrative, a couple millennia of poetics, but not that much about nonfiction. Karen had started Assay, and both of us thought there needed to be more craft writing. I’m absolutely hoping that more people will write about craft or push back against my book as well. There really isn’t enough creative nonfiction or creative nonfiction craft and criticism being written, and what has been written has come more from either a narrative or a journalistic bent. Lyric essays by themselves—barely anything is being written about the craft of them.
I think you had said, in your initial email to me, something interesting—which was a kind comment—you called the book “nuanced.” I’ve been thinking about the idea of “nuance,” and I feel like what little craft writing on the lyric essay already out there has been trying to establish the broader strokes. There is work describing dominant forms that you see lyric essays being written in—like the braided essay, or flash, or the hermit crab—and you also see some of the broader strokes about strategies, but I think we need even more in-depth analysis of the lyric essay so that we have more specific and innovative arguments. The fact that you called my book “nuanced” makes me feel like maybe we’re starting to get there because nuance implies that the broad strokes have been established and now we can get on with finer discussions, even down to splitting hairs. Now we can start getting into nuance, and hopefully start having fruitful conversations and useful arguments.
AS: Thank you for that generous response. I teach creative nonfiction and memoir, and I love lyric essays, but I haven’t found such intricate craft discussions on them, and I think that’s why I really appreciated this book. I’m not always sure how to say concretely “this is what a lyric essay is,” and “this is what it isn’t,” so I found your book super helpful.
HC: I think coming up with some sort of basic definitions can be helpful. I tried to frame the question more as what the form is doing, rather than what it is. That is, what is the lyric essay doing on the page?
AS: There are numerous instances within the book in which you write that an element of the lyric essay should be left to a reader’s interpretation. How much do you think the writer should keep this caveat in mind when writing?
HC: I tend to not worry too much about what is this? as I’m writing, but I still think about the craft strategies and how I’m deploying them while being aware that using lyric strategies quite often includes elements that invite a sort of cocreation from the reader. For instance, if you have white space, then it’s engaging the reader in different ways, and the reader has to decide, is this sort of a pause to let something sink in? Is it creating a connection between the two ideas or images? If I’m reading two different fragments or two different segments, are they being placed side by side so that I’ll notice something similar between them? Or, is it a turn and we’re completely going in a new direction? It’s forcing the reader to make those kinds of decisions. Although the writer may set up their craft very skillfully so that it doesn’t take long for the reader to figure out what they’re supposed to do with it. But that can be part of the fun too.
As opposed to what happened (narrative mode) or what it meant (rhetorical/assay mode), lyric essay is trying to convey what an experience felt like. Deploying all of these different lyric elements—whether it’s sound or visual images, smell, or doing strange things with time to show how sometimes you’re experiencing multiple layers of time at the same instant, or how one moment feels dilated and goes on forever—all of these sensory-rich elements engage with the reader in a different way than a more traditional linear narrative would.
AS: In the essay “Negative Capability,” you pose a series of questions about the correlation between fragments and trauma, specifically how white space can represent a lack of agency or a regaining of control when writing about trauma. Do you foresee more experimentation with white space given the prevalence of this theme in the current climate?
HC: Absolutely. I feel like experimentation with white space, and especially the fragmented essay, has just exploded. Not just white space, but the lyric mode itself as a way of thinking through the essay. Because of its hybridity, I think the fragmented lyric essay is a form that has been very useful for writers from the margins, but in particular for those talking about trauma. I don’t think there has to be a correlation between trauma and marginalization, and I think there can be a danger in assuming as much, which is why I also encourage thinking about how the writer is using white space. It’s a tool like anything else. I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all, but many brilliant authors are using it to indicate rupture, absence, erasure, breaking, things that are breaking, things that are missing.
AS: You conclude “Negative Capability” by saying, “We need to make writers and readers of creative nonfiction and especially the lyric essay aware of the continuum in use of white space—the difference between the unsaid and silence, the different flavors of silence, and the different energies of motion across white spaces—so that both writers are more thoughtful in how and why they’re employing it and readers know what they’re reading and listening for.” How do you think this goal could be best achieved?
HC: I think by both thinking about the use of white space, like when you’re deploying it, and why you’re deploying it. Having a reason, just like you would for anything else that we do in creative writing, right? That there’s a clearly articulable answer for that deployment, same as when we say: Why did you use this image? Why this image? When you break the line, why did you break it here and not there?
Just because white space seems empty doesn’t mean it’s not doing work. So, writers and readers need to think about that more. And by that same token, I think we need to train readers how to read white space in the same way that we try to train readers how to read poetry and to think about why the line is broken here or there. If there’s a white space, that’s part of the writing of it. That’s part of the message of it.
Because I had come from training in poetry and had read so much about what a poem is doing on the page, thinking about getting rid of lines and writing in prose quite often makes the lyric elements become more important—not less, whether that’s syntax, or rhythm, or how often you’re creating sound or image resonances. This is also true of the white space. How are you using the space on the page if you’re not writing in lines?
AS: I like how you said that the lyric essay often “occup[ies] that gray space on the continuum between poetry and prose.” A lot of what you’re looking at is how the lyric essay fits into genre. After writing this book, how do you think your knowledge and experience with the lyric essay informs how you look at and understand genre?
HC: Writing this book has made me aware of genre in interesting ways. Going back and rereading texts that I thought I knew, like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and saying, “Well, this is fiction and nonfiction and poetry altogether,” but then forcing myself to ask questions about what that hybridity means.
Karen Babine’s fantastic essay in Literary Hub, “A Taxonomy of Creative Nonfiction,” has been helpful in framing these questions for me. She’s breaking down genre like fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but then also into modes and forms. Poetry can be fiction too, and poetry can be narrative, and it can be lyric. Thinking more about the questions: Are we talking about genre? Are we talking about mode? What makes them different from each other? And how far can you go before it starts becoming something else?
I’m not necessarily sure that I’m invested in there being hard lines—here’s prose poetry and here’s lyric essay. But thinking about these classifications does make me aware of possibilities, or where someone’s doing something interesting or even pushing my boundaries. I start questioning, how far can you pursue that approach before the piece becomes fiction? And what does that line mean?
I’m not sure that I have all the answers, but I actually love it when I have a reaction. It’s forcing me to think: What do I mean by that? And am I even right? And by that same token, I’m hoping that people will read this book and go: “Oh, no, that’s bullshit,” and push back and have their own opinions and say, “No, that’s not lyric. That’s narrative.” Or have even more ideas about what nonfiction is or should be doing.
I fully acknowledge that I was mostly trying to nail down the lyric side of the essay because it felt like that’s where a lot of the confusion was happening and where “lyric” was just getting taken to mean “short and kind of quirky.” Lyric means something very specific within literary theory, which is being completely plowed over in the rush to label anything short and quirky as a lyric essay. But at the same time, I don’t have as much training in nonfiction or essay, so I’m hoping maybe there will be some counterbalance of other people reading this book and saying, we really need to be thinking about how the nonfiction genre applies here, which I might have completely missed myself.
AS: I appreciate you saying that, because so much of the business side of writing compels categorization—fitting everything in a neat genre box—and I think so much of what you’re saying with where writing’s going, regarding lyric especially, is that it’s just getting grayer and grayer. There are times I’ve read a lyric essay or prose poem, and I’m just not sure which is which.
HC: I do think that there are some very fine distinctions that can help you decide but I still don’t think those distinctions create a definitive line. In the book, I used an Amy Lowell essay from 1914 in which she defends free verse from those who were pushing back and saying that’s not even poetry. Lowell’s trying to draw the line between what was called “vers libre” and metrical prose, and she is looking at this continuum of it and calls it “rate of return”—meaning, how often you have repetitions of sound or image or that kind of density of language. It just felt like the prose poem was probably doing a little bit more of rate of return than the lyric essay. But again, I don’t think there’s like a hard line, like if you have 3.5 returns per line, then it is a prose poem. I don’t think it works that way.
AS: I think that’s the great thing about your book. It opens so much room for discussion.
HC: I hope so. I mean, I really, really want it to be a conversation and I don’t want to be the final word. I’m just trying to recognize that there’s a lack in the conversation and put something out there to at least get it moving forward and then hoping that others will keep it going.
AS: So, on a lighter note, can you talk about the cover?
HC: At first, I couldn’t decide how I felt about it, but it grew on me, and now I really, really, really, really love it. When they asked me, “Well, what are you picturing for a cover?” I said I wanted a sort of muse-looking femme playing the lyre, but I want her to be windmilling it like Pete Townsend from The Who. I feel like the artist, Annabel Hewitson, nailed it. It looks both classical but also kind of punk and riot girl. I love it. I think she did a fantastic job.
AS: Much of your description of the lyric essay is about its recursive nature, so, to go back to the beginning, you end your introduction: “I hope this book adds to that conversation, and I hope we continue to see more.” What are your hopes for the lyric essay itself, and for the craft of the lyric essay?
HC: I really don’t want to be the expert on this subject. I think we get into trouble if there’s only one person who’s anointed as the expert. I wrote the book because it needed to be written. I was willing to go there, and I hope that my contribution will keep the conversation going. Argue with me, please! Let’s keep going forward with it.
Currently, Lee Ann Roripaugh and I are completing our coediting of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, which will be released at the start of 2026. We made a conscious choice in writing the guide to not include a lot of the more foundational lyric essay authors. By trying to keep the conversation moving forward, we made the decision to include a lot of new voices, both for their own creative work as well as their craft ideas, to push the lyric essay to continue to evolve and grow and expand and encompass even more.
HEIDI CZERWIEC is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of the Pleiades Press 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and she is also the coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, forthcoming in early 2026. An essayist and poet, she writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Find her on Instagram @hkczerwiec.
AMY SCHEINER has been published in Slate, HuffPost, and Longreads, among others. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is the coeditor of the literary journal, Moonlighting by Lit Pub. Find her on Twitter @amy_schein and Instagram @amy_scheiner.
