The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.
Charles D'AmbrosioI have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.
Charles D'AmbrosioBehind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.
Charles D'AmbrosioWe need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter.
Charles D'AmbrosioEven with an assignment, I take over, I find a freedom and make the idea my own, and that's where you get the sense that the essays become something very different than the original subject. Assignments are great, though - they test your mettle, your spirit and resilience. All of sudden you drop in, you don't know anything, you're vulnerable and available.
Charles D'Ambrosio