Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

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

When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader.

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.

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

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.