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.

Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

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

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

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

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.