I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.

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

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

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.

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

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

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