I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

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.

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

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.

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

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.

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