Join essayist Randon Billings Noble in exploring the segmented essay (also known as the collage or mosaic essay). Segmented essays are divided into sections that might be numbered or titled or simply separated with a space break. These breaks allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest each segment before moving on to the next. Each segment may contain something new, but all still belong cogently to the whole. In this session, we'll look at examples of segmented essays that show creative uses of this form. We'll also do a series of writing exercises (focused on place) that will lead to a segmented essay of your own. Participants will leave with a new understanding of the segmented essay as well as new work.

RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019 and her anthology A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays is forthcoming from Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the "Modern Love" column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Currently she is working on her next book, a lyric meditation on shadows, and teaching in the West Virginia Wesleyan Low-Residency MFA Program. She is also the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art. You can read more at her website, www.randonbillingsnoble.com.

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A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (forthcoming October 2021)

What is a lyric essay? An essay that has a lyrical style? An essay that plays with form in a way that resembles poetry more than prose? Both of these? Or something else entirely? The works in this anthology show lyric essays rely more on intuition than exposition, use image more than narration, and question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has responsibilities—to try to reveal something, to play with ideas, or to show a shift in thinking, however subtle. The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

In A Harp in the Stars, Randon Billings Noble has collected lyric essays written in four different forms—flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab—from a range of diverse writers. The collection also includes a section of craft essays—lyric essays about lyric essays. And because lyric essays can be so difficult to pin down, each contributor has supplemented their work with a short meditation on this boundary-breaking form. 

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Be with Me Always: Essays (2019)

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted—he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us.

In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted—by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn’s violent death, a book she can’t stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts—in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

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