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.

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

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

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.

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.

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.

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.