What the nostalgic past and the imaginary future seem to share in common is a form of idealism, perhaps a dream of wholeness. Our future is just as goopy with sentiment as our past. To me, they're the same, both very tempting, and I don't believe in either, although the idealism is probably important.

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.

Sometimes I'll have an end in mind, but it's always false, always corny, just a dumb idea anyone could have, sitting on a barstool. An abstract thesis with no real life inside it. And then I start writing and the writing itself confounds me, taking away the comfort of knowing the end in advance. How is that even possible? Doesn't the conclusion come at the end? How can you begin with one - that seems odd, right?

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.

We 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.

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.

Behind 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.