Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

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.

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.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.

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