The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.

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

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?"

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.

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.