I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?

There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come across lines like that - when the writer is not only making a meta-move, but one that troubles truth and fiction, the nature of genre itself.

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

Simply put, meta-writing is writing that is self-conscious, self-reflective, and aware of itself as an artifice. The writer is aware she's writing, and she's aware there's a reader, which goes all the way back to Montaigne's often-used address "dear reader," or his brief introduction to Essais: "To the Reader." It can be done in a myriad of ways.

Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voice that is singular, and that's what I think writers should strive for, to have a style and a voice that is only theirs.