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.

My instinct tells me "purpose" is maybe the enemy of a good personal essay. In my own experience, I'm always lost and wandering and searching - where am I? how'd I get in this mess? what's the point? - right through to the final draft, and sometimes even beyond that - baffled and defeated still, confused as to purpose long after the thing's in print. I never really have a guiding purpose or a point, not at the outset, anyway. It's like life: It's all discovered en route.

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

I'm kind of a creature of the alt-weekly universe - my real education into higher culture was acquired in coffee shops, reading those papers, digging into that lively mishmash of opinion for drift, a sense of what to see, what to hear, what to read, etc. - and I'd like to think that scene's still vital, although I understand there's been a fair amount of conglomerating, which would seem to undercut its radical roots, its funky local flavor. I'd encourage any writer with an eye for life and an ear for prose to give it a try. You can work out your chops just fine in newsprint.

Even 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.

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.

Our nostalgic dreams of perfection thrive just as dangerously in the other direction too, in the imaginary future, that bold and tantalizing future where the troubles of today will be cured by a tomorrow, and all our losses will be recouped, our problems solved, our lives restored, our people made whole again, etc.