In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

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

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

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.