What a joy to spend this morning Zoom-visiting John Howard’s Studies in Nonfiction class, where they have been reading and responding to my lyric essay “What You’re Thinking Now Is a Chunk of Marble” published in the Southeast Review. Thank you to John and his students for their insights and generosity!
The Southeast Review has made the entire essay available to read online:
https://www.southeastreview.org/single-post/38-2-christopher-citro
Two weeks after teaching poetry at the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture on Kefalonia, Greece, I taught my 13th year at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing: prose poetry & flash fiction, the lyric essay, and literary publishing…plus a writers life panel and my poetry reading. I’m a very fulfilled poet and teacher this summer! On top of that I have one more writing conference to teach at: the awesome Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks!
Wednesdays 6-8 pm ET, I’m offering another session of my popular poetry workshop “In the Landscape of Contemporary Poetry.” The title is always the same but the readings, prompts, craft talks are always different, so you can take it again and again! We’ll read very recent poetry, I’ll provide original prompts to help inspire your new poems, we look at craft elements, we’ll workshop your poems. Writers at all levels are welcome! Class begins Wednesday September 11.
Thursdays 6-8 pm ET, I’m offering my also popular “Introduction to the Lyric Essay.” This workshop will usher you into the wild and liberating world of the lyric essay, a popular form of the contemporary experimental creative nonfiction essay. If you are a nonfiction writer wanting to engage with this popular form, this is the class for you! If you are a poet wanting to branch out into a new genre, this is the class for you! If you have never written creative nonfiction before, this is the class for you! Writers at all levels are welcome. Class begins Thursday September 12.
Registration is now open, and it closes on Monday September 9.
Details & registration available at:
https://christophercitro.com/private-classes/
Register soon as spaces fill quickly! 😀
I’m thrilled to have received my contributor copy of the new Alaska Quarterly Review, which contains my lyric essay “Have You Ever Given Your Sister a Snowman?” along with a heap of amazing stories, essays, and poems. Thank you to my friends Dustin and J for graciously allowing me to interview them for this essay. Thank you to Ron Spatz and everyone at AQR for publishing it. You can buy issue in print/ebook/pdf/kindle on the AQR website, and I hope that you will!
Wow wow!!! Alaska Quarterly Review accepted my lyric essay “Have You Ever Given Your Sister a Snowman?”! Yippee! Thank you to my friends Dustin and J for allowing me to interview you for this essay. Thank you to Ragdale Foundation for providing me with a residency and fellowship where I could write the early drafts of this essay. Thank you to Ronald Spatz for accepting it!
I’m teaching an online 8-session (Weds 6-8:00 pm ET) creative nonfiction class on the lyric essay starting January 26 for the Downtown Writers Center. Registration is inexpensive and open to the public. You can register with a credit card by calling (315) 474-6851 x380.
To learn more about The Downtown Writer’s Center and download the winter class schedule, with all of their awesome class offerings, visit the Center’s website: https://ymcacny.org/creative-writing-workshops.
My lyric essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World” just got published in the new online issue of Bellingham Review! I’m so excited to share this with you all. This is the final essay in my Four Classical Elements series. It’s the water essay, and includes 4000 words on the times I almost drowned, life in the deepest oceans, collecting water from famous places, fish I have known, a diary entry from when I was 15, Altered States, Jaws, Howie Mandel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind…just to name a few. A thousand thanks to all the great folks at Bellingham Review, including B. Woods, Suzanne Paola, and Caity Scott!
Read it HERE!
Day 2 of this summer’s virtual Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and I just finished teaching my class on The Hermit Crab Essay. What an amazing session, such wonderful comments and questions, and the in-class writing that people shared was…wow…so generous, so moving, so beautiful.
This summer’s virtual Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing is underway this week! Today I’m delighted to be teaching my Introduction to the Lyric Essay class! Wonderful opening ceremony last night, with readings by Leonard A Slade Jr. and Alexander Weinstein. Skål!
I had a wonderful time Zoom visiting Jared Green’s ENG 344 class at Stonehill College to talk about my writing and all things Lyric Essay. What a great group of students!