When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader.
John D'AgataYou 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.
John D'AgataYou create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.
John D'AgataIf Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.
John D'Agata