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

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

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

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

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.

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

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.