While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.