Author: Miki Reilly-Howe

With the end of 2023 in sight, I reread my January post in this blog. There it was in black and white: my commitment to finish the first draft of my book this calendar year. The good news is I’m close. The bad news is that, in writing the final chapters, my plot began to collapse like a Florida sinkhole.

I spent most of the summer revising. Then I deleted entire chapters and began again. Eventually, I created more problems than I’d fixed. The story felt like a dead end, and I seriously considered deleting the entire manuscript. I needed a breakthrough.

It was pure serendipity that a class I’d been wanting to take became available during this trying time. The class was on Lyric Essay, and I’d watched it sell out twice already this year. I put my story aside and signed up for ten weeks of writing something entirely different.

Lyric essay is a relatively new form of creative non-fiction. Describing the sub-genre as “essay” is a bit of a stretch. The form is a hybrid of poetry and memoir. Where traditional essays aim to persuade, lyric essays tend to hypnotize.

The best example of this form, if you are interested, is Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark. A beautifully written memoir, each chapter is an essay that braids the author’s experience of raising her two children with her vast knowledge of fairy tales, revealing strangely contemporary insights. It’s stunning.

The class I took focused on structure like the braiding found in Happily, but also juxtaposed vignettes, collages, alphabetical lists, photographs, fortune cookies, body parts, even notes in a medical file with topic prompts to uncover a new way to write about personal experiences. It was cathartic, and I found myself wrestling with topics I’d never had the guts to write about previously.

When the class ended, I had nine essays in my queue and a fresh outlook on structure and language. I opened my manuscript and that dead end disappeared. Sometimes, taking a break can lead to a breakthrough.

Tucked away on my list of new year’s resolutions in 2009 was a simple commitment: start writing. It landed somewhere between lose ten pounds and stop chewing nicotine gum. It would reappear on my lists for another six years before I did anything about it.

I had intended to be a writer all along, but life doesn’t always go according to plan. I had a busy career, a failed marriage, and a son to raise by the time I made that commitment to write again. Perhaps you can relate.

Starting took some effort. It had been decades since studying literature in school, and the writing I did for my day job didn’t really count. I started with a few online classes, trying both fiction and non-fiction to see what held my interest.

When I had the opportunity to take a workshop with one of my favorite authors, I jumped at the chance. It was part of Woodstock Bookfest, an annual three-day event in upstate New York. The workshop was incredibly helpful, and so were the many panels I attended.

At one of those panels, an author spoke about her debut mystery novel and all the support she received from an organization called Sisters in Crime. I had always been a fan of mysteries; I read two or three books in that genre every week. But writing a mystery? I wasn’t sure about that. Although a mystery did seem right for a character who’d been haunting my thoughts for a while. To my surprise, a story began unveiling itself that evening.

Back home in northern Kentucky, I looked up Sisters in Crime, joined, and connected to the chapter closest to me. It’s ironic that a book festival in the Catskills led me to the Derby Rotten Scoundrels in Louisville, Kentucky, but life is like that. This year, my resolution is to finish my first draft of that story. I still haven’t lost the ten pounds or given up nicotine gum, but thanks to my Louisville Sisters in Crime, I’m damn close to writing the last chapter.