In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

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

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

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.

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.

We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.

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