I started this project with several goals in mind. From the academic prespective, the intentions of this project were to create a lyric essay course -- curriculum and syllabus -- that could be taught in the Writing Department as a level three class. Accomponying it would be a lyric essay collection that would have at least one of each kind of lyric essay -- prose poem, flash nonfiction, collage essay, braided essay, and hermit crab essay -- and would serve as a resource to be taught in the class. But from the scholarly prespective, the goals were to create a more definite definition of the rather ambiguous genre of lyric essays, putting into words how exactly a lyric essay was different from creative nonfiction or "lyrical essays" and finding a way to explain it to a person who has never heard of them before. Overall, these intentions all melded together and made up my Summer Scholars project. For eight weeks I was more than just a writer: I was a researcher, an analyzer, an editor, and . . . well, a scholar. I read dozens of essays and books on writing/essays, wrote stacks of notes, and with Professor Marks help got to write a collection and a lyric essay class.

My first week was devoted to doing purely research and notetaking. There were several questions I had to take care of before I could really start working on anything else: what did other people say lyric essays were? How many types of lyric essays were there? How did a person go about writing them? I needed to know the answers to these specific questions because I needed to know what exactly the lyric essay was before I could properly write it or offer lessons on writing it to other people. I spent most of this period reading and researching sources over the internet and in the library. I would look up a book or the essay Professor Marks recommended to me, read it while taking notes, and then move on to the next book. At this point my idea of a lyric essay was that it was a fancy essay.

The next few weeks were spent compling answers to those questions, reading over my notes from the initial phase of research during week 1, filtering through all the writing jargon I had accumulated, and finding a way to explain lyric essays as plainly and accurately as possible. In this period I did most of my writing. I find that I loose focus on a paper if I only work on that one paper for a long time, so during this project I often had two essays open on my computer at the same time and would take turns working on each. I also wrote and rewrote several drafts of my definition for lyric essays thorughout the duration of my project. While every new source on lyric essays I read held relevant information, they also all held different standards for what a lyric essay was, making it difficult to pin point any concrete facts on what this essay exactly was. I ended up constantly tweaking my definition throughout the whole eight weeks, my initial thoughts of it just being a "fancy" essay abolished. 

When I went about writing the essays and curriculum I would continue my research by interspersing my writing time with more reading. For example, I would write for two hours, then read for an hour before taking on another two hour writing block. After a draft of something was done, Professor Marks would look over it and point out which places could use revision or could be strengthened, as well as name other sources and essays for me to check out to further my research. Throughout this time I kept up notes on everything that I read and a daily journal where I regularly wrote my thoughts on the project.

There were three main goals for this projet: to create a defintion for the lyric essay, to compose a lyric class syllabus and curriculum, and write a lyric essay collection composed of at least five essays -- one essay for each type of lyric essay -- to accompany the course. By the end of the eight weeks we (Professor Marks and I) were able to finish the lyric class syllabus and curriculum, the recent draft of which can be found below. We were also able to complete my goal of writing a five lyric essay collection and can also be found below as well. As for the clear definiton for lyric essays, this is what I came up with:

A lyric essay is an experimental hybrid essay that doesn’t tell a straight-forward narrative. 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.