As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

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.

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

If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

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