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.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

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

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.