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.

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

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.

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.

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

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.

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