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

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

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.

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.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.