“It is the blankest of blank pages,” the writer Rachel Cusk once observed of the essay. This workshop will embrace this blankness and test various concepts of the essay. It will pay attention to the idea of the essay as thought in process and explore aspects of form and voice commensurate with such. In this vein, the workshop will examine perspectives ranging from those of Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida to the more recent practice of Kevin Adonis Browne and more. In the process, we will consider how the essay might engage the poetic and consider the uses of the lyrical (and anti-lyrical) within an essay-writing practice. In short, we will treat the word essay as both verb and noun.
