What is Heidi Czerwiec reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Heidi Czerwiec, co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers.

Her entry begins:

I’m usually reading for several different purposes, so this grouping reflects that. Because I got in the habit of doing mini-reviews of books that I paired with perfume on Twitter, I’m going to continue that practice here.

I recently heard Aisha Sabatini Sloan read, and while I loved Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, I hadn’t read her newest, Borealis: An Essay, so I grabbed a copy. It’s a magical, funny, thoughtful book-length lyric essay about a Black, queer body moving through White spaces—in this case, the expansive glacial landscape of Alaska. I would pair this with Zoologist’s Snowy Owl, which smells cold: a woodsy base, but the icy notes of iris, mint, and green galbanum lend an austere beauty.

Because I’ll be teaching it this fall, I’m reading Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s ostensibly a memoir of...[read on]

About The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, from the publisher:

FEATURING ESSAYS FROM: 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 • Marco Wilkinson

The fifth volume in the immensely popular Field Guide series, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay gives readers an extraordinary window into the methods of 26 expert practitioners at the leading edge of this ever-evolving genre.

With original craft essays, exercises, and examples, each contributor offers reflection and instruction on how lyric essays can be constructed and what makes them unique. As experts in the field, they offer their various approaches to creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language and the resonances of sound and imagery. The anthology’s expertise spans 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). Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh further illuminate the genre in their introduction, exploring the history of the lyric essay and its vital place in contemporary literature. This field guide is an indispensable addition to the bookshelf of any reader, writer, or instructor intrigued by this inventive and expressive genre.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Heidi Czerwiec's website.

Writers Read: Heidi Czerwiec.

--Marshal Zeringue