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

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

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.

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

I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open.

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

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