Re-Enchanting the Lyric Essay Workshop: 4 Forms | Feb 2027 Online

Re-Enchanting the Lyric Essay Writing Workshop: 4 Weeks, 4 Forms with Dr. Erica Anzalone

Begins Sunday, February 14, 2027
Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET

🌍 Class Times by Time Zone:

• Los Angeles (PST): 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
• Chicago (CST): 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
• New York (EST): 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
• London (GMT): 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
• Berlin (CET): 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Now Enrolling!

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button to talk with us.

Instructor Dr. Erica Anzalone is the author of the award-winning collection, Samsara. Erica holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctorate in English from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship. With over eighteen years of teaching experience at the college level, Erica's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Autofocus Literary Magazine, The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Cream City Review, Juked, Pangyrus, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Offending Adam, Pleiades, Sentence, UCity Review, and elsewhere.

Who is this class for?

This online writing workshop is for writers of all levels who are curious about the lyric essay and want to experiment with form in a generative, playful way, whether they’re new to the genre or already working within it. Poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers alike will leave with four new or substantially developed drafts and a broader toolkit for using structure to generate and shape their writing across genres.

What to expect:

This generative lyric essay workshop approaches the form as a site of transformation, where structure is not limitation but a kind of spellwork. Each week introduces a different container for your writing: the list, the braided essay, the hermit crab, and the segmented essay. Each is a shape that holds fragmentation, memory, association, and image, allowing language to move through the body of the text in ways that deepen rather than narrow meaning.

Dr. Anzalone approaches the lyric essay with a poet’s ear, focusing on how sound, rhythm, repetition, image, syntax, and associative movement create lyricism at the level of language. Rather than treating form as a set of rules, we’ll treat it as a cauldron, something that concentrates and intensifies language, altering perception and making the familiar strange again through pressure, juxtaposition, and concentration. We’ll play with the shadows of goddesses, ghosts, and grimoires, re-enchanting old forms and myths with a new sense of wonder.

Although our focus is the lyric essay, this creative writing course also draws on poetry and fiction that move through the same formal strategies, so you’ll see how each structure travels flexibly across nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Each live Zoom session combines discussion of the readings with in-class generative prompts, and you’ll have opportunities to share new work and receive encouraging writing feedback in a supportive community. Sharing is always optional.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, students will generate four new drafts, or substantially develop works-in-progress, using list, braided, hermit crab, and segmented forms. Students may submit work twice during the course for individualized written feedback from the instructor. Each submission may include one poem of up to 2 pages or a prose piece of up to 2,000 words. Students will also have opportunities to share work generated during class and receive brief verbal feedback.

Readings

Readings may include excerpts from work by Randon Billings Noble, Ariel Gore (We Were Witches), Natalie Diaz, Gwen E. Kirby, Lily Dancyger, Lidia Yuknavitch, Arianna Monet, Carmen Maria Machado, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kat Moore, Marcia Aldrich, Sarah Einstein, and Clarice Lispector. Weekly selections are listed in the course outline below. Additional optional and bonus readings are included in a weekly course reader.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: The List — Association, Accumulation, and the Lyric Leap

Students will generate a list-based piece, using repetition, juxtaposition, and associative leaps to discover unexpected connections among seemingly disparate images, memories, and ideas.

• Craft: Randon Billings Noble, “Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay”
• Hybrid: Ariel Gore, selections from We Were Witches
• Poetry: Natalie Diaz, “From the Desire Field”
• Fiction: Gwen E. Kirby, “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn't Tell the Trojans Because at That Point Fuck Them Anyway”

Week 2: The Braided Essay — Juxtaposition, Recurrence, and the Invisible Thread

Students will generate several distinct strands, including the option of a strand drawn from myth, folklore, or fairy tale, and experiment with braiding them together to discover the “invisible thread” connecting them.

• Craft: Lily Dancyger, “Looking at an Eclipse: A Braided Essay About Braided Essays”
• Creative Nonfiction: Lidia Yuknavitch, “Woven”
• Poetry: Arianna Monet, “Thinking about ‘The Little Mermaid’ in the Waiting Room of the Otolaryngology Department” (companion poem exploring associative thinking through fairy tale)

Week 3: The Hermit Crab — Borrowed Forms as Creative Cauldrons

Students will choose a borrowed form, such as a Tarot card, spell, recipe, quiz, letter, or other found structure, and use it as a container for new creative material.

• Fiction: Carmen Maria Machado, “Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead”
• Poetry: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “When You Select the Daughter Card”
• Flash Nonfiction: Kat Moore, “Let the Coconut Be His Head”

Week 4: The Segmented Essay and Beyond — Multiple Lenses, Repetition, and Hidden Architecture

Students will approach a subject through seemingly unrelated categories or fragments, then experiment with repetition, motif, and association to create a hidden architecture connecting the sections.

• Creative Nonfiction: Marcia Aldrich, “Six-Sided Life”
• Creative Nonfiction: Sarah Einstein, “Self-Portrait in Apologies”
• Fiction: Clarice Lispector, “The Fifth Story” (a modular story that offers another way of thinking about repetition, variation, and accumulation)

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Generate four new drafts or refine works-in-progress through in-class prompts.
• Receive detailed feedback from Dr. Anzalone and your peers in a supportive community.
• Build a flexible toolkit of forms for generating writing across genres.

TESTIMONIALS:

“Thank you, Erica, for a fabulous class! I've learned so much about the writing process and relished the texts. Each class has helped awaken long-slumbering skills of analysis and muscles of creativity that I haven't exercised in some time. I'm especially grateful for the workshop portion, both for my own piece and for others. I've always been insecure about my writing style, but these classes have really boosted my confidence and filled my well of creativity. The workshop notes I received validated my process and helped magnify the paths to take next. I'm so grateful to Erica and the writing coven that is forming through these classes.”

— Kristilyn Ink

“With Erica’s mentorship, I am now attending the MFA program of my choice and have published several of my poems. She saw potential where I did not, and she pushed me out of my comfort zone by encouraging me to write creative non-fiction. She taught me to trust in my own writing and the fact that my stories are valuable on their own. I fell in love with creative non-fiction because of her. Not only did Erica spend an ample amount of time with me (more than she had to!), she provided me with pages of written feedback that helped me revise and assist in the publication process. I am a much stronger, more confident writer since working with Erica, and am successfully pursuing a career in the field of creative writing.”

— Kerri Vasilakos (Kerri’s poetry has appeared in Black Moon Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, The Penman Review, and Crow and Cross Keys)

“Erica helped me with my applications to MFA programs in Creative Writing. With her assistance, I was accepted or waitlisted to every place I applied, and I'm now a student in my top-choice program. Throughout our work together, Erica was empathetic, challenging, and generous. She helped me to present myself with confidence and clarity. Her feedback was always specific and extensive, and I know the advice she gave me was critical to the success of my applications. I'm sure these skills transfer over to her classes together. I can't recommend working with Erica enough!”

— Lizzie Fox, Writer/Translator

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $330 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

• Instructor: Dr. Erica Anzalone
• Begins Sunday, February 14, 2027
• Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
• Tuition is $330 USD.