Writing “Shapely” Essays with Meander, Spiral, Explode

Come explore the more experimental side of the essay by reading – and writing – essays that take the form of different shapes: meanders, wavelets, spirals, and more. We’ll use Jane Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode as a jumping off point to see how essays can be more creatively structured as we play with both content and form.

We’re usually taught the five-paragraph essay in school, where you say something, back it up three ways, and say it again.  But essays can be vastly more creative, more interesting, more experimental.  In this session we’ll look at some of the structures that Jane Alison explores in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative: essays that meander, that build in wavelets, that spiral in or out to explore their ideas.  We’ll read examples of different kinds of essays and do a series of generative exercises to start sketching essays of your own.  Come with a notebook and pen, your curiosity, and a willingness to both explore and play.

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her full-length collection Be With Me Always was published by Nebraska in 2019 and was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Essays. Her lyric essay anthology A Harp in the Stars, published by Nebraska in 2021, won a Forward Indies Honorable Mention for Essays. Randon’s lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017, and her essay “The Heart as a Torn Muscle” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016 and selected for the anthology The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Individual essays have been published in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; PANK; Brain, Child; Sweet: A Literary Confection; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; The Rumpus; Brevity; Fourth Genre; The Los Angeles Review of Books; Creative Nonfiction, Literary Hub, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. Her next book is a lyric meditation on shadows, also forthcoming from Nebraska, in 2023.