Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

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

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

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.

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.

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.