A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

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.

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

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

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.