I’ve taught it for years, and many students at first resist the challenges its form offers-and then find themselves inspired. This book, like Rankine’s work, is groundbreaking and offers lessons with every reading. (Plus, I love how Claudia Rankine talks about image+text in Citizen in this great talk at the Woodberry Poetry Room.) No matter how you slice it, they’re brilliant books that will make you ask yourself about your relationships with family, language, and race in America. Some people call them lyric book-length essay.
CNF TINY TWEETS HOW TO
These aren’t chapbooks, but they’re irresistible examples of how to weave together a book of nonfiction in shorts. And, I, too, love Sara’s language, which swirls around insects, death, destruction of the land, and other anthropocene themes that may be prose/may be poetry but are completely enticing.].ĭon’t Let Me Be Lonely & Citizenby Claudia Rankine I’m In Transit, Krys explores stories of transit that become metaphors for family, identity, transition, and the longings and triumphs translocation. Back in 2016, Krys and Sara were students in that first graduate class I taught focusing on the semester-long micro-essays-as-chapbooks, so of course, it’s a joy to teach their work and have them talk with students about how to write a chapbook. Ryan’s work placing her millennial loneliness in the context of death and destruction of the earth is perfectly suited for the flash chapbook form. The Cupboard Pamphlet’s flash chapbooks are little and boxy and stylish and widely varied in their style and subject matter.
CNF TINY TWEETS FREE
This one is published and available free online (magical) by Essay Press their chapbooks and books (especially Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment) have been so much fun to teach.Įxcellent Evidence of Human Activity by Sara RyanĪlong with Walker’s Micrograms, I teach from this chapbook for two reasons: 1.) it’s good! and 2.) a lot of people who don’t read and write in poetry aren’t very familiar with chapbooks, which seem to be one of the best ways to highlight experiments that can’t go on for hundreds of pages. Students get really playful and start to challenge the edges of nonfiction, to find what creative nonfiction can do.
After we start the chapbook, we watch a documentary about the Lykov family (who live in the remote Russian wilderness, undiscovered for decades), read an article about their history, and then students write their own “fairytale-essays,” with fabulist elements, in the same form as Minor’s. There’s a talking stump, the story is told in two columns with dialogue written like a script. This is another of my favorites to teach because of how students first find themselves flummoxed and then enamored. The Persistence of the Bonyleg by Sarah Minor (Please also read the magnificent Egg and the new edition of Bending Genre, which is about books that fit neither here nor there and will delight you.) It’s like studying the world through, as David Lazar says, a microscope-but one with a vast, zoom-able view of the world.
CNF TINY TWEETS SERIES
It’s a beautiful definition, in itself, of how a creative nonfiction conceit can work as a series of “micro-essays.” Walker focuses on my favorite themes: the environment, parenting, science, love, and her intense focus, like Lydia Davis’, is transfixing. When I began designing the chapbook conceit class, this is the book that became my model. I’d seen my students produce some of their most miraculous work from short assignments, which often later became the central nuggets or jumping-off points for longer works. This provides a constraint, which, as most writers know, can be both a great source of anxiety and creativity.Īs a writer, I love a constraint years ago, I had fun writing a series of linked CNF flash pieces one by one, every day, which I later fictionalized and wove through with found text.
The idea: Commit to writing poems around a single topic, idea, question, or theme, for the entire semester. No reading and re-reading in the week before? No 500-word response letters to the writer? I felt the sky above me open, sunshine lighting the path to a workshop that might encourage more levity and play.Īnother poet I’d talked to years ago told me about a conceit assignment that they do with their students (I cannot remember who this was-please let me know if you recognize the assignment so I can credit you!). A poet mentioned that in their workshop, they read the poem on the spot and then discuss it together. In 2016, I was no longer interested in teaching the traditional workshop and felt that my students no longer wanted it.
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