Experiment with Hybrids: The Lyric Essay, Prose Poem, and Flash Creative Nonfiction with Joanne Furio

SATURDAYS, September 5th - October 3rd 

If you’re ever felt bound by the constraints of genre, this class is for you. We will study and experiment with three hybrid forms: the lyric essay, prose poem, and flash creative nonfiction. The lyric essay combines the storytelling of narrative nonfiction with the lyricism of poetry and often the hard facts of journalism. The prose poem, a centuries' old genre, utilizes the sentence-and-paragraph form of prose as a vehicle for poetry’s lyrical language, metaphor, and imagery. Flash creative nonfiction likewise uses poetic techniques combined with memoir’s truth telling in a narrative of 1,000 words or fewer. 

Following the model of an MFA craft class, we’ll read the work of hybrid writers such as Abigail Thomas, Roxane Gay, and Maggie Nelson and do freewrites inspired by their examples. In-class exercises and at-home assignments are designed to spur new work and push writers into innovative creative territory. Class participants will come away with a broader understanding of hybrid forms, along with new experimental work of their own.

Joanne Furio is a writer of creative nonfiction whose work often bisects several genres. Her author interviews, personal essays, flash, and prose poems have appeared in Believer, Craft Literary, Catapult, Juked, Panoply, Brevity Blog, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Piccioletta Barca (a Cambridge University arts magazine), among other publications. She teaches creative writing at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship and received an MFA in 2016. At Berkeleyside, the online news platform, she is an award-winning arts and culture writer who does the books coverage.