I understand that the lyric essay can be a difficult concept to comprehend -- it took me eight weeks just to figure out how to explain what they were. To help better understand what a lyric essay is and how it differs from other essays, here is an excerpt from my syllabus on how a lyric essay stands out in the writing world from other genres, including the defintion I created for the lyric essay through my project:

What IS a lyric essay? 

    Bare Bones Definition: an experimental hybrid essay that doesn’t tell a straight-forward narrative like an academic essay. It is a sub-genre of creative nonfiction that borrows traits from several different writing genres — poetry, memoir, personal essay, etc. — to be used in any combination of the writer’s choosing to communicate a message. Focuses more on an idea or ideas and explores that rather than recite an argument or narrative.

Think of this in food terms. The regular academic essay that you write or read for school is beef wellington. Everyone — or at least your teachers — knows what a beef wellington is, what it looks like, how it’s supposed to taste, what ingredients should go into it, etc. Due to this there is very little creative flexibility to the beef wellington, as with the academic essay, since there are standards to fulfill. You cannot just serve a slab of meat with a pile of dough on the side and tell people it is beef wellington just as you cannot hand in your psychology report on the effects of a specific drug on teenagers to your professor in the frame of a prescription pill bottle label. You have to follow the directions already laid out. Just as the pastry dough must be wrapped around the beef to be beef wellington, you have to follow the usual essay format for the academic essay. 

Creative nonfiction, at least the genre of it, is salad. It is an umbrella term for a lot of different types of writing, as there is a lot of different types of foods that are considered salads. There is potato salad, caprese salad, macaroni salad, tunafish salad, egg salad, chicken salad, taco salad, caesar salad, garden salad, fruit salad, cobb salad, three bean salad, ham salad, greek salad, cookie salad, and so many more. And in creative nonfiction there are personal essays, memoirs, autobiographies, etc. They all can be completely different from each other, using ingredients that you couldn’t possibly dream of using in the other, but at the end of the day, they are all considered salad, or creative nonfiction, and always have the door open for other dishes or writings to enter their communities.  

The lyric essay is an omelet. The egg is the page, the base of your work and the central platform on which you build your essay just like everyone else. All the goodies you put into it — the cheeses, the veggies, the meats, the spices — are whatever traits from other genres you, the writer, want to include in it. Omelets, like the lyric essay, come in all different shapes, sizes, appearances, textures, and tastes, but at the end of the day there all have one thing in common — they are all born from similar platforms, the egg, or in the case of the lyric essay, the page or the essence that it is an essay (despite what its appearance may suggest otherwise). However, like with a real omelet, you want to include ingredients — traits — that enhance and satisfy whatever you are going for in your lyric essay, and not just add as a whim or to make your paper look fancy. In other words, the traits from other genres that you use must have a purpose — they must add to the message and experience that you are trying to convey in your essay for the reader.