Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Eula Biss - Fiction Advocate.
The Lyric Essay Course Description and Objectives: The lyric essay is one of the most exciting forms of creative nonfiction, one that resonates with the twenty-first century’s need for new ways of representing our lived experience.Eula Biss The Pain Scale 0 No Pain The concept of Christ is considerably older than the concept of zero. Both are problematic—both have their fallacies and their immaculate conceptions. But the problem of zero troubles me significantly more than the problem of Christ. I am sitting in the exam room of a hospital entertaining the idea that absolutely no pain is not possible. Despite the.This conversation was inspired by Eula Biss’s stunning New York Times essay “White Debt,” which had this metaphor at its core: ”The state of white life is that we’re living in a house we believe we own but that we’ve never paid off.”.
And as I read the lyric essays of writers such as Eula Biss, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and others, and experience the meandering, fragmented, associative playfulness of their work, I see what Montaigne and Sanders mean. And yet, there’s something about this idea that also bespeaks a Wildean Lie.A lot of writers note the way the lyric essay asks the reader to fill in gaps and make leaps. But Eula Biss reminds us that’s not a license to be vague: “I am suspicious of gaps, of silences, of contradictions because I know how easily they hide unfinished thinking and insufficient research.”.
Lyric Essay is a contemporary creative nonfiction form which combines qualities of poetry, essay, memoir, and research writing, while also breaking the boundaries of the traditional five-paragraph essay. As a genre unto itself, the lyric essay tends to combine conventions of many different genres.
