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

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

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

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

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

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.