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.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live.

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

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.