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.

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

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.

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.

You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.