Rather than setting, character, and plot, lyric essays rely on poetic tools: listing, white space, punctuation, & associative logic.

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Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City begins with a short, lyric essay called “Dragon Fruit.” In this imagistic piece, the narrator is suffering from heartache, and her mother is tending to her by feeding her slices of dragon fruit, encouraging her to clear her system. Responding to both her pain and the fruit itself, the essay ends: “She wants me to shit it out. This time, she hands me the knife.”

There is no further description; no narrative arc. It’s a short, impactful scene that startles and prepares readers for what comes next.

Coming between each longer memoir chapter, these flash pieces work as lyric interludes, reflecting on the relationship between the narrator and her mother. Often no more than two pages long (“Dragon Fruit” is barely more than a page), these interludes rely on lyric structure more than narrative, braiding image and emotion to tie small truths to the larger whole. In an interview with The Rumpus, Wong describes these pieces as “the glue of the book in a way,” later describing them as “a strange, beautiful mold—like slime mold or something.”

“I don’t even know what to call those sections,” Wong tells The Rumpus. She describes them as “speculative nonfiction sections,” stating that there’s “another kind of universe that occurs in those sections.” These interlude pieces are set off with a black frame around each page, visually indicating their separation from the memoir chapters while also adding uniformity among them. I love thinking about them as “speculative” because I also think of (almost) all poetry as speculative. Poetry does not hold the same devotion to nonfiction that Creative Nonfiction must, and so there is more freedom to imagine beyond narrative truth.

Memory works with an associative logic: something can just pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, although there may be hidden roots lurking between the images and ideas.

Rather than setting, character, and plot, lyric essays rely on poetic tools such as listing, white space, punctuation, and associative logic. Meet Me Tonight’s second interlude, “Ghost Archive” is especially lyric. It immediately places us in the conceit set up by the first: a website called “www.WongMom.com” where the narrator (or anyone) can ask her mother for advice. “I type in my question,” the piece begins, “‘What do you do when you’re afraid?’” The typography that follows suggests the cursor of someone on the other side, beginning to reply:

 

As we await WongMom.com’s response, the piece launches into a description of a photograph, her memories associated with it, and a digression on memory. The lack of transition reflects how memory works with an associative logic: something can just pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, although there may be hidden roots lurking between the images and ideas.

In Crafting the Lyric Essay, Heidi Czerwiec uses a similar metaphor to Wong’s “slime mold,” describing the lyric essay as fungal, drawing from Amy Bonnaffons (whose craft piece “Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay” is no longer available online). Both authors suggest that there are multiple ways of conceiving of essay structure, turning to the rhizomatic structures of fungi, for example. Czerwiec suggests that essay fragments represent “the fruiting bodies [of mushrooms] popping up, seemingly random yet connected and communicating below the surface.”

Wong takes a fragmented, associative approach to structure, braiding image, emotion, and idea rather than developing a narrative arc. By creating a character out of WongMom.com, she brings a below-the-surface communication to the surface. While this character is consistent in the lyric interludes of her memoir, each one is very different from the others. “I didn’t want it to be a thread that was too consistent or have the same texture each time,” she tells The Rumpus, “I wanted a braid that would grow like a strange, beautiful mold—like slime mold or something. Grow and glow and contract as its own being.”

And WongMom.com has truly become its own being: it now exists! Visually, it reflects the home-made websites of the early 2000s, and the “ask” box looks like AOL Instant Messenger. Clicking on the different buttons yields playful results, ranging from silly screaming animal memes to a sweet photograph of the author and her mother. Some link to information about and excerpts from the book itself. I ask WongMom for help writing this post:

Is a persimmon tree like a fungus or a mold? I can think of more than a few reasons why and why not. I embrace the open-endedness of lyric, rather than seeking a solid answer. I take a moment to appreciate how the strange and beautiful mold has spread from the pages of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City to the wilds of the Internet. Like a lyric essay itself, my search for answers has yielded more questions. And isn’t that what the most haunting poetry does? As writers ourselves, we too can forego narrative for slime mold. We can also hold consistency and variability together, letting elliptical logic propel our pieces forward while remaining bound to a conceit.

I type these reflections out to WongMom and receive increasingly abrupt responses. I think she’s growing tired of me. Eventually, she tells me I have to eat more dragon fruit and clear my system, and it feels fitting to end where the book begins. It is our work as writers to cultivate and nourish and empty. We are the ones who hold the knife.

So I will also leave you with this advice.
 

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Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Her creative and critical work has been awarded several prizes, appearing in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, as well as several other anthologies and journals. Balkun holds a PhD from the University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and the University of New Orleans.