Nowadays I imagine people find freer and more accepting venues in blogs, on Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, in the riot of shouting that trails in the wake of every news story. So there's always the pandemonium of the Internet, if you need to get your lunatic opinions out in public. I find most of that stuff a little insane-making and my preference is to encounter personal essays in the relatively sedate and stable universe of print, in literary quarterlies, magazines and books. But I'm sure you can find plenty of good stuff in lonely outposts all across the World Wide Web.

I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.

In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

My presence isn't simply about "character" - I'm present in every part and particle of the thing, in the sound and rhythm of the sentences, in the shifting tones and the selection of details, in the comedy, the sadness, and the confusion. For the space of an essay, I'm the air you breathe, everywhere and nowhere. With a personal essay, I don't think you'd want it any other way. You ought to have the sense of an encounter, the impression of having met someone. In my essays, for better or worse, that someone is me.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more like a perspective, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, a questioning presence. I don't sit on the sidelines or pretend to objectivity; and I'm not afraid to stick my neck out or to be revealing and vulnerable.

I like the desperado aspect of essays, the free lance, that mercenary kind of thing, so I just do it, without asking anyone's permission. I've never written a query letter, I don't pitch pieces, I have no market in mind, I don't spend any time trying to figure out where I might fit in.