Lyzette Wanzer - Fall 2021 Resident
Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. She received her MFA in Fiction from Mills College. A flash fiction connoisseur and essay aficionado, her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, The Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, Tampa Review, The MacGuffin, Ampersand Review, Journal of Advanced Development, Fourteen Hills, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Pleiades, Flashquake, Glossalia Flash Fiction, Potomac Review, International Journal on Literature and Theory, Fringe Magazine, and many others. She is a contributor to The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press), and 642 Tiny Things to Write About (Chronicle Books). Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Lyzette is the current judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s nonfiction category.
Lyzette has been invited to present her work at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association (CEA), Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Litquake Festival, San Francisco Writers Conference, and others.
Lyzette is a member of the National Writers’ Union, where she serves on the Northern California Chapter's Steering Committee, The Authors Guild, and The Writers' Grotto nonprofit organization. She has also served on the Grotto's fellowship adjudication panel. Lyzette has been awarded writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center (NY), Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts (NE), Playa Summer Lake (OR), Horned Dorset Colony (NY), Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow (AR), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. She is the recipient of an Investing in Artists grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, two Individual Artist Commission grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, and two Professional Development Grants from the Creative Capacity Fund. Her newest project is an essay anthology called Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative (Chicago Review Press, 2022). She is also working on Professionalize Your Creative Writing Practice: Building A Career As A Literary Artist, a professional development workbook for creative writers.
While at PlySpace, Lyzette led a workshop for emerging writers titled, “Building A Career As A Literary Artist”. “Building A Career as a Literary Artist” took place on Saturday, October 9, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm at Carnegie Library in Downtown Muncie. Registration and masks were required.
This full-day in-person workshop, led by PlySpace Resident Lyzette Wanzer, was an empowering, vital asset addressing the practical concerns of establishing a sustainable literary career. The truth is that building a writing career requires both creative and business skills, just as it does for any other artists. If you are serious about your writing and want to increase your professional opportunities, just as much work needs to happen outside of the studio as within it. Topics included marketing and PR best practices, applying for literary grants and fellowships, writing your personal statement, creating and using a literary calendar, and how to present yourself as a professional, both online and off. Participants received a comprehensive packet of handouts to guide them that they can use for reference as their career begins to build. Building A Career As A Literary Artist was geared for creative writers who are ready to engage in the not-so-sexy but essential steps necessary to advance their careers and promote their work.
Laptops, tablets, or iPads were required for this workshop. There are two breaks and a lunch break.
Artist Statement by Lyzette Wanzer
“Contrary to popular cultural belief, I agree with bell hooks when she says in Bone Black, that “there is no one story of black girlhood.” In Odd Girl Out, Rachel Simmons points out, “To imagine a universal minority female experience would be to repeat exclusive patterns of research.” My work turns a multifaceted, often divergent, lens on black girlhood and womanhood. My goal is to hobble stereotypes and stagger the expectations of lenses through which I, as an African American woman writer, am so frequently viewed.
The nucleus of my work is very language-oriented. How many shades of meaning may I demand from a phrase? How much heavy lifting, how much freight, can I coax from a word? I am partial to freighted, muscular writing that counters the conventional, displays a clean, even voice in the meat of each piece, and reflects my flair and appetite for expression. My work skates around the periphery of custom, while realizing considerable power in the end note. That note may not always be a resolved one, but it is an earned one. Of prime importance to me: work that discomfits, contemplates, balances scene and summary, and delivers the unexpected in the process.
I tend to look to visual artists as mentors, especially Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher. Their art informs my work in muted ways. One lithograph that I often have in mind when composing new work is Escher’s Relativity, in which a trio of gravitational forces function in perpendicular relation to one another. Dali’s Animated Still Life, an oil-on-canvas where the typical objects of a still life--fruit bowl, flask, wine glass--course through the air, serves as another muse. Dali has said of this painting, “The entropy of a still life is a way of amending nature.” My work give substance to space, validating my own attempts to gain triumph over tumult.
My inspiration stems from Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s AWP Writer’s Chronicle article, “Writing a Shadowbox: Joseph Cornell and the Lyric Essayists.” Fletcher’s article--and by way of him, Charles Simic’s essays--challenged me to work with an atypical eye. Simic, our fifteenth Poet Laureate, writes elastic, anomalous essays, the kind that makes readers climb inside the prose and inhabit his prismatic flavors.”
