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

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

People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live.

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

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.

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.

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