Session Four · Unit Two — The Neighbors
The Elevator — Flash Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay
The Genre: Flash Nonfiction & the Lyric Essay
Handouts & Worksheets
Main Points of the Lesson
- Brevity is pressure. Flash nonfiction, usually under 750 words, is not a short essay; it is a compressed one. Every sentence carries more than its share.
- The lyric essay thinks like a poem. It moves by image and association rather than argument, trusting white space to do some of the work.
- Segmented form. Numbered or titled fragments let the reader assemble meaning between sections. The gap is part of the text.
- Facts can sing. Doyle builds from the facts of hummingbird and whale hearts toward the human heart. Research can be the raw material of lyric.
- The elevator ride. A thirteen-story building gives us a form: thirteen fragments, one per floor, an ascent that is also a structure.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras” (The American Scholar, 2004) — read at The American Scholar
A short essay on hearts that moves from hummingbirds to blue whales to us. - Brevity, “Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay” — read at Brevity
A craft essay naming four common lyric shapes: flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab. We will use all four. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 9, “Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- J. Drew Lanham, “On ‘Joyas Voladoras’” (Assay) — An ornithologist and essayist on why Doyle’s essay works.
- Brian Doyle — background (Wikipedia) — The editor and essayist of Portland Magazine.
- Lyric essay — the form (Wikipedia) — A short history of the hybrid form.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Thirteen Floors. Write thirteen numbered fragments of one to three sentences each, one for each floor of the building. Each fragment is a single image, fact, overheard line, or memory. Do not explain how they connect. Fragment 13 should arrive at the roof — literally or not.
Fifteen minutes. Speed helps; the connections will appear later, when you read the fragments back.
What happens with this: nothing is collected. It is yours, written on paper, in your notebook. No one is asked to read aloud who does not wish to.
Discussion Questions
- “Joyas Voladoras” is full of facts. At what point do the facts become feeling?
- What does white space do in a segmented essay? What happens when you read one fragment immediately after another?
- Doyle ends on the human heart. Could the essay have begun there? What would be lost?
- Which of the four forms in “Consider the Platypus” best suits a story about a building?
Homework
- Read Tell It Slant, Chapter 11, “The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction.”
- Write a flash essay of no more than 500 words, or revise your Thirteen Floors into a finished lyric essay.
- Read for Session 5: Gay Talese, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” It is long; read it across several evenings.
- Read the course page Writing Our Neighbors before next session.
For the 2601 Anthology
Flash pieces are the anthology’s connective tissue — short windows between longer memoirs. Keep every fragment you like.
Before Next Time — Session 5
Across the Hall — The Profile and the Portrait. We learn to write another person truly — from observation, scene, and the testimony of those around them.