If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

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

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

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.

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else.